Very well executed

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This low-budget crime caper about a quartet of clueless cretins who assemble to rob a bank qualifies as inspired lunacy. Director Gary Yates and scenarist Lee MacDougall have fashioned a funny little flick with good and bad characters. The morality of this piece is such that the robbers are punished for their notorious deeds. However, despite their abject failure to reap the benefits of their ill-gotten gains, the sympathetic ones are redeemed for a largely happy ending. The soundtrack ripples with memorable Top-40 hits, including Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," April Wine's "Say Hello," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain." Clocking in at a spartan 79 minutes, "High Life" doesn't squander a second and drums up many surprises as well as a refreshing sense of spontaneity. The personalities of these small-time criminals are etched brilliantly, too. Dick (Timothy Olyphant of "Hitman") is a hospital janitor, but he doesn't hang onto this job for long. A former prison cell mate, Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre of "The Lookout"), visits Dick at work, and Dick gets fired in short order for Bug's shenanigans. Dick's other loser friend Donnie (Joe Anderson) who knows how to steal purses and wallets and withdraw money from the owner's ATM accounts. Dick concocts a scheme where Donnie will pull out $60 and then use other cards to get $54o. Dick recruits a romantic looking French guy Billy (Rossif Sutherland of "Timeline") who will take both the receipt and the cash into the bank and complain to a teller. Dicks hopes that the bank will contact the repair crew, and Bug and he will masquerade as a repairmen and raid the ATMs. Dick's well-laid plans go awry when the pretty teller, Alma (Brittany Scobie of "The Plague"), that Billy sweet-talks, decides not to inform her manager that the ATMs are on the blink. Instead, she takes the cash for herself. Incredulously, our protagonists watch her stroll off to lunch with the $540.No sooner have our heroes witnessed this disaster than an armored truck whips up to the bank. Bug, who is high on cocaine, brandishes an arsenal of firearms. Billy pulls out his gun, too. Dick struggles to convince Bug and Billy from resorting to violence. Bug shoots Billy because these two haven't gotten along well since they met. Bug hijacks the armored truck with Donnie and his relative Lynn (Kelly Wolfman of "Reasonable Doubt") inside and takes it to their other former prison inmate friend, Moondog (Michael Bell of "Goon") who owns a garage. In a frenzy, Bug uses a jackhammer to drill a hole in the top of armored truck and pipe in carbon monoxide. He does this to flush Lynn and Donnie out of the vehicle. Meantime, Dick has helped Billy up off the pavement and put him in a car and they careen off to Moondog's garage. Dick watches as Bug pulls $300-thousand out of the armored truck. While nobody is looking, Lynn slips an exploding paint canister into the bag. Dick and Bug flee the scene to a ranch, but Dick refuses to ride off into the sunset with Bug."High Life" is an impressive comedy of errors. The cast is first-rate, especially Timothy Olyphant and Donald Sutherland's other son Rossif. Stephen Eric McIntyre makes a grim villain with a trigger happy streak in his warped psyche. Yates creates both suspense and comedy and the film never degenerates into a gritty, unsavory saga, as it could easily have done. I'd never heard of it unless I saw it on clearance sale at a Dollar General Discount store.

Caught this on Showtime, and it struck me as a real gem flying low under the radar. Though obviously not big budget, it held my interest and really worked. Excellent script, acting, etc. (For some reason it reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's "Straight Time".) While Showtime has far more than its share of truly awful gay vampire flesh eating low budget considerable violations of the film genre pieces of crapola, sometimes, "even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then." Consider this little jewel a humble acorn undeserved by Showtime.This flick really works. I've done some time on the street, and have seen the interaction of morons with reality. One is left pondering that classic bit of wisdom, "The best laid plans of mice and men, often go astray..."But, even if you are a loser, you have to play out your hand. What the arty fartsy French existentialists would term, "La condition humaine."

This is low down fun. It has a very well-scripted, plotted, and thought through feel to it and there really are worse ways to send your time.It reminded us a lot of Australian cinema, where losers just keep on losing but just more and more outrageously, and it is a film that makes you laugh mostly 'cos it ain't you.All the characters are exactly that, characters, and all of them are nicely done. Everything from the get go just works and the take on the 80s is pitch perfect - no Reaganomics and Wall Street here, this is 70s hangover time to perfection.A fun little movie with heart, drugs, and great, great incompetence...

I saw High Life last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. As caper movies go, it was one of the better ones I've seen. The real focus in on the four hapless criminals, who are all interesting, multi- faceted (and often amusing) characters. The script is clever, and the acting is uniformly strong. The film starts with the (now somewhat clichéd) tactic of showing the audience a scene of how everything has fallen apart for the four criminals during the heist, and then taking us back a few days to see how things got to that point. Make no mistake, this is a 'light' film and not a particularly memorable one, but it's a fun and often unpredictable ride that provided plenty of chuckles right until the end. After the screening, Director Yates and the cast fielded some questions. Yates was an amusing guy and made some insightful comments (particularly regarding the fun soundtrack), but I was a bit disappointed at how flippant/glib Timothy Olyphant's responses were. Seemed like a bit of a douche to be honest--like he saw himself as 'above' the project or something.