THE SHAKEDOWN (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Shakedown, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2024

Co-writer/director Ari Kruger attempts a screwball crime comedy with The Shakedown, in which an affair leads to blackmail, physical intimidation, high-stakes gambling, financial malfeasance, murder, and witnessing the repeated falls and rises of a seemingly unstoppable henchman. The movie's plot is goofy enough to work on that level, perhaps, but it miscalculates in trying to make a sympathetic figure of the haplessly misguided protagonist who sets the mess in motion.

He's Justin Diamond (Carl Beukes), the head of a life insurance firm that also operates as a weird sort of self-help program. Based on Cape Town, Justin is all about money and flashy displays of his wealth, living in a mansion with his wife Natalie (Julia Anastasopoulos) and their two kids, driving around in an expensive car, and wearing one of the most expensive smartwatches on the market. When he's pitching his policy/program to a room of potential clients, the guy makes a point of telling everyone how much the watch costs and "accidentally" putting a picture of his happy family on the screen, faking humility as he does.

It's tough to like the character, despite some fine-tuning on the part of Beukes' performance to give the man a hint of insecurity beneath the bombast. After all, the company is only Justin's because it was his father's first, and his late old man was a pillar of the local community—an example he tries to live up to but knows he probably will never match. Justin is obsessed with looking like a decent man, a fine husband, and an adoring father, but he seems to spend most of his time selling insurance and exercising to exceed the fitness goals of his own insurance policy.

Anyway, we quickly learn that Justin isn't the most morally upright man, since he's having an affair with his physical therapist Marika (Berenice Barbier). She's worse, perhaps, after he breaks off the affair (She wants a commitment, and he doesn't) and Marika demands a lot of money to keep her from posting a sex tape she recorded of the two of them.

Justin scrounges up the cash, taking most of it out of an account for his children's futures, but has second thoughts about paying off his former mistress. He confides in his ex-convict brother Dovi (Emmanuel Castis), asking him to send some goons to intimidate Marika.

Obviously, the plan goes wrong in multiple ways, on account of Dovi's own bad memory and the fact that one of the stooges brings a gun along to the shakedown. That leads to the henchmen, Dovi, and Justin being hunted by a criminal boss who wants revenge.

There are two possible approaches to material like this. One is to make the protagonist a generally fine and/or likeable character who simply gets in over his head, meaning we're hoping for that character to find a way out of a predicament beyond his control. The other is to make such a character as generally awful as the people who cause the trouble in the first place, meaning we're rooting for the chaos of the situation.

Kruger and co-screenwriter Daniel Zimbler try to blend those ideas together, wanting us to laugh along with the pandemonium of the mounting steps of the backlash, while also sympathizing with Justin despite his assorted shortcomings and flaws. It's an inherent contradiction in both approach and tone, and considering how fundamentally disagreeable—selfish, narcissistic, and greedy—Justin is before the plot gets started and as it progresses, it's especially difficult to care about his uncertainties, guilt, and desire to live up to the standard he has set himself.

The plotting itself, at least, is occasionally clever, because or in spite of its multiple contrivances. Some of them are so absurd as to be admirable, such as the wronged crime boss' henchman Henko (Milton Schorr), who somehow survives an onslaught of attacks (He's not the only indestructible character here, which undermines any kind of tension that could exist).

Some of the developments here, though, are just nasty or odd. Well, one of them in particular is especially strange. That's a subplot involving Natalie, who worries about Justin's sudden disinterest in her sexually and buys a life-sized sex doll in an impromptu act of guilt-free revenge. It pays off for the central narrative by the end, one supposes, but the low comedy of the running gag is such a contrast to the rest of the story that it's a distraction. It doesn't help that, while there aren't many women in the movie, each of the key ones exists to be a nuisance, a dead body (if we can believe that by the end after assorted, apparent resurrections) to start the real plot, or a joke.

The whole of The Shakedown seems to be hedging its bets, from the shaky handling of its protagonist to the consequences of the story's violence. It may seem odd to say one can't take this material seriously, when it's obviously a comedy, but that's a major part of the problem. The movie does want us to take some of it, especially in terms of some of the characters, seriously, but it's too insincere and uncertain of itself for that to happen.

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