![]() The men use dynamite to blow a hole through the bank’s concrete roof, clogging the ancient alarm system with surfboard gel. So he sets out to rob the United California Bank in the Orange County suburban hamlet of Laguna Niguel. Enzo figures that if they can rip off a president who’s ripping off the system, then no one will come after them. “You know, you’ll never look at those c-ksuckin’ birds the same again.”) Enzo is a Midwestern yob who hears a rumor, right out of the mouth of Jimmy Hoffa, that Richard Nixon has been amassing illegal campaign contributions and storing them in a dirty-money fund. (“You ever read that ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’?” he barks. Harry is the film’s sidecar hero, but it’s his cousin, Enzo, played with lounge-lizard style by William Fichtner, who masterminds the heist, gathering up a group of hotheads, only one of whom, played by Louis Lombardi from “The Sopranos,” has a forceful presence. ![]() “Finding Steve McQueen” goes the down-and-scuzzy route, but nothing in the movie feels quite genuine, from the signposted ’70s macho dialogue (“That hippie chick on ‘Mod Squad’? Wouldn’t mind slippin’ her the high hard one!”) to the cheeky slapdash tone that suggests a B-movie Rip Van Winkle trying to make a heist caper that’s so weirdly pre-Tarantino it reduces every potential moment of danger to fake cuteness. They either need to be convincingly gritty street dramas, like “Rififi” or “Reservoir Dogs,” or entertainingly intricate Rube Goldberg whirligigs that revel in their mission impossibility, like “The Killing” or the best “Ocean’s” films. up until that time), “Finding Steve McQueen” is overly invested in the broad comic irony of half a dozen bumbling yokels from Youngstown, Ohio, pulling off the crime of the decade. And though the movie is based on a burglary that actually occurred (it was the largest bank robbery in the U.S. It’s one of those films in which the period atmosphere relies too much on an official array of groovin’ ’70s rock songs (“Draggin’ the Line,” “Funk #49”), as well as the kind of cheesy “light” caper music you used to hear on TV soundtracks of the era. ![]() Steve McQueen was the essence of a certain brand of gleaming heartless cool, but “Finding Steve McQueen,” as directed by Mark Steven Johnson (whose journeyman credits range from the action fantasy of “Ghost Rider” to the indie sentimentality of “Simon Burch”), is an uncool movie in almost every way. ![]()
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