Roofman

I have been looking forward to Roofman ever since I saw the first trailer so my nephew and I went to see it with a big Saturday night crowd.  It is funny but it is also much more poignant than I was expecting and I really liked it.  Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) is at loose ends and estranged from his wife and children after being discharged from the military.  He is especially upset at not being able to give his children everything they want so, after observing the routines and schedules of a local McDonald's restaurant, he breaks in through the roof at night and surprises the early morning shift in order to rob the safe. He continues until he is eventually caught and sentenced to prison but, once again, he exploits the routines and schedules to escape.  He takes refuge in a Toys "R" Us store while he waits for his friend, and fellow soldier, Steve (LaKeith Stanfield) to procure him the necessary documents to leave the country.  However, Steve is deployed and will not be back for six months so he creates a more permanent hiding place behind a display.  He figures out how to stop the CCTV cameras from recording, roams the store at night, subsists on peanut M&Ms, and washes in the employee bathroom but he gets bored so he sets up baby monitors around the store so he can observe the employees.  He surreptitiously intervenes when Mitch (Peter Dinklage), the ill-mannered manager of the store, refuses to accommodate a scheduling request from Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst) and this eventually leads to a relationship with her and her two daughters, Lindsay (Lily Collias) and Dee (Kennedy Moyer).  When Steve returns and provides his documents, his relationship with Leigh wreaks havoc on his plans for escape.  Tatum gives an outstanding performance, one of his very best, and he handles both the humor and the pathos with a deftness that is sometimes difficult to achieve.  He is so charismatic that you root for him to succeed even though what he is doing is wrong and I really liked his arc as he discovers that people just need love rather than things.  I appreciated the deliberate development of his relationship with Leigh, even if the action does get a bit bogged down towards the end, because it provides a compelling motivation for his actions.  Dunst is also outstanding (she has tremendous chemistry with Tatum) and Dinklage is an amusing villain.  I thought that I would probably enjoy this but I am surprised by just how much I liked it.  I highly recommend it!