Mark Reviews Movies: QUEENPINS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 9, 2021

There's a deeper assessment of the nuances and loopholes of the law, as well as the idea and the ideal of the so-called American Dream, somewhere to be found in the story of Queenpins. It's loosely based on a true one, in which three women illegally made millions of dollars by selling counterfeit coupons online.

That case is a bit more straightforward and obviously illegal than the one designed by co-writers/co-directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly. Here, a pair of women sell real—but, admittedly, stolen—coupons online, and it's more of a technicality that causes anyone in law enforcement to care enough to do something about it.

The lines are blurry enough in this story that the whole enterprise seems pretty ludicrous, and that's the goal here. We don't need this tale to dig too deeply into its underlying questions of the law and the American ideal of success, because it's a comedy at heart—a funny and fairly scathing one about those deeper issues, too.

We meet Connie Kaminski (a firm Kristen Bell), an avid coupon-clipper and former Olympic athlete (in race walking), and her neighbor and friend JoJo Johnson (a cheery Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who lives with her mother and runs a start-up cosmetic company that has yet to achieve much of anything. Both women had a big dreams once.

Connie wanted to become a mother. After going deep into debt on account of bills from a fertility clinic, the only results were a lot of disappointment, plenty of pain, and a fully furnished and decorated nursery, where she stockpiles all of the groceries, cleaning products, and toiletries that she gets from coupon bargains. Her husband Rick (Joel McHale), an auditor with the IRS, wants Connie to get a job and is coldly impatient with his wife's obvious depression.

JoJo, meanwhile, might have been able to get a small business loan or set up some credit, but her identity was stolen, meaning that no bank wants anything to do with her ambitions. She can't even take credit card purchases for her wares, and who pays or events wants to pay for stuff with cash these days? These are simple but wholly relatable details, and they go a long way in establishing sympathy and some level of support for these characters.

The plot—both in terms of the narrative and the central scheme—begins when Connie writes a letter about stale cereal to the company that produces it. She receives a coupon for a free box of the stuff—the rarest of deals in her world of gathering cents-off and buy-one-get-one coupons.

She writes more letters, receives more coupons for free stuff in the mail, and comes up with a plan. If Connie and JoJo can get a bunch of these coupons, they could sell them for half their worth and make a substantial profit. A trip to Mexico, where the big companies have their coupons printed (in order to save costs on labor, by paying local workers a couple dollars an hour), and some people willing to send the two women extra coupons are the only things it takes. It's kind of ingenious—illegal, too, of course, but still clever.

The rest of the plot—and there's a lot of it, despite the homegrown nature of this technically criminal enterprise—is fairly familiar stuff. The two women, with the help of JoJo's identity thief (played by Bebe Rexha), set up an untraceable website and various bank accounts to keep suspicions at bay. A misunderstanding about the money's "cleanliness" sends Connie and JoJo on a spending spree to launder the cash.

Meanwhile, Ken Miller (Paul Walter Hauser), a hard-nosed and socially awkward loss-prevention representative from a major chain of grocery stores, tries to get the FBI to investigate what looks like a major counterfeiting ring. Instead, he gets a straitlaced US Postal Inspector named Simon Kilmurry (Vince Vaughn) to look into possible mail fraud.

As recognizable and predictable as a lot of this material is, the reason the film succeeds is that the filmmakers take this story as seriously as they believe the crime deserves to be taken—which is to say not too seriously at all. Tone goes a long way to making Gaudet and Pullapilly's larger point, which sees Connie and JoJo's scheme as something relatively harmless. That's especially true compared to, say, the labor situation in Mexico that's exploited by the coupon manufacturers and the large corporations that purchase them, as well as the ease with which the women buy guns from and sell them to some shady folks.

The distinction, perhaps, is that it laughs with Connie and JoJo, as the scope of their scheme increases and finds them ill-equipped to handle the resulting complications. Meanwhile, it laughs at people such as the fussy and obsessed Ken (played with pitiable sincerity by Hauser), the self-serious Simon (a deadpan Vaughn), and the large team of federal agents who are eventually assembled, with an arsenal of high-powered weapons, to go after a pair of otherwise ordinary suburban women. Gaudet and Pullapilly know their targets, and they go after them with efficient—and, in one instance involving Ken's digestive regularity, low-brow—but pointed humor.

No, Queenpins doesn't need to go deep to accomplish its goals, but that's not only because it's a comedy. Many of its more relevant points about accepted corruption, hypocrisy, and the gray areas of the law are just sitting there on the surface, waiting to be hit.

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