Upon exiting a press screening of Good Time, which opens in Chicago tomorrow, I was ready to recommend the film. The movie had shaken me, commanding my attention with a brilliant interplay of camerawork, editing, music, and performance. I had been under its spell as I watched it, and I left it in that heightened state that you achieve by engaging with worthwhile art.
Before Pattinson can have sex with the girl, the man he’d believed was his brother wakes up, takes off the bandages, and reveals himself to be someone else. A heated confrontation ensues, but the stranger (another young scumbag like Pattinson) manages to strike a deal. Some friends of the stranger hid a soda bottle filled with LSD at a local amusement park earlier that day; he and Pattinson will go recover the bottle, sell the contents, and split the money, which Pattinson can put toward his brother’s bail. They go to the amusement park, granddaughter in tow, and break into the ride where the soda bottle was hidden. The two young men get stopped by a security guard, an African emigre (played by Barkhad Abdi of Captain Phillips). Pattinson beats the guard to a pulp, steals his uniform, then pours the LSD-Sprite mixture down the guard’s throat so that he’ll be intoxicated when authorities (whom the guard has summoned) arrive. The cops quickly show up, and the disguised Pattinson (beard shaved, hair dyed bottle blond) talks his way out of a police inquiry while the granddaughter gets arrested for being near the scene of a crime.
