{"id":139420,"date":"2025-09-07T13:07:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T13:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/139420\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T13:07:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T13:07:08","slug":"channing-tatum-in-true-crime-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/139420\/","title":{"rendered":"Channing Tatum in True Crime Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plenty of crime films make breaking the law look glamorous, but few are as wholesome as \u201cRoofman<\/a>.\u201d Director Derek Cianfrance<\/a> (\u201cBlue Valentine,\u201d The Place Beyond the Pines\u201d) focuses on the human element of his true-crime inspiration in this superficial crowdpleaser, based on the life of a North Carolina man who escaped from prison after the series of fast-food heists that gave this film<\/a> its title. He then proceeded to live in the bowels of a Toys \u201cR\u201d Us store for more than six months, before being caught again after committing another armed robbery at the same store where he had been hiding out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of yarn that earns the description \u201cstranger than fiction,\u201d and the details of how Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum<\/a>, gaunter than usual but just as toned) was able to build a makeshift life out of items scavenged from a toy store are fascinating. (This was in 2004, so a lot of \u201cSpider-Man\u201d merch was involved.) Unfortunately, however, \u201cRoofman\u201d also capitulates to the feel-good demands of Hollywood storytelling, leaving the pricklier aspects of Manchester\u2019s story on the table. And the film is forgettable as a result.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Wake<\/a> \"'Rental<\/a> <\/p>\n

Here, \u201cthe human element\u201d means Jeffrey observing the everyday dramas and petty power struggles at Toys \u201cR\u201d Us through a series of baby monitors he cleverly mounts in the manager\u2019s office, not the crushing irony of him hiding out in a store overflowing with the same plastic status symbols that made him an outlaw in the first place. (As we learn early on, the humiliation of not being able to buy his daughter a bike for her sixth birthday was the inciting incident of Jeffrey\u2019s criminal career.) The latter is way too political for this particular film, which is true even as \u201cRoofman\u201d is overwhelmingly on Jeffrey\u2019s side.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LaKeith Stanfield co-stars as Steve, Jeffrey\u2019s old Army buddy who has a sideline in fake passports. At one point, Steve leaves for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and picks right back up with his forgery business when he gets back. He does this not because he\u2019s a greedy person, nor for the thrill of it; in the America in which these characters live, a little law-bending is just what you have to do to get by. \u201cRoofman\u201d expends little effort considering the deeper (and, to be fair, more depressing) implications of this reality; instead, it shrugs and says that it\u2019s okay, because they\u2019re really not bad guys deep down.<\/p>\n

This is especially true for the character of Jeffrey, who Steve accuses of being a \u201cbad criminal\u201d because he cares too much about the people around him. Tatum does stretch his acting abilities in scenes where Jeffrey\u2019s con-man charisma is underlaid with desperation and deception, but there\u2019s nothing in Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn\u2019s screenplay to seriously challenge Tatum\u2019s persona as a leading man. The opening scene is downright charming, as Jeffrey breaks into a McDonald\u2019s before opening and takes three employees hostage, insisting that they put on their coats before he locks them in the walk-in freezer so that they don\u2019t get cold. The manager doesn\u2019t have a coat that morning, so Jeffrey lends him his.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Making Jeffrey any less likable would completely sink the second half of \u201cRoofman,\u201d which slows the pace to a meander as Jeffrey begins a sweet romance with Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), a single mom who works at the Toys \u201cR\u201d Us. There\u2019s a world where it\u2019s creepy for Jeffrey to court Leigh after secretly watching her for months, but again, this isn\u2019t that kind of movie. Instead, Cianfrance simplifies another complicated dynamic as Leigh, her daughters, and the married couple (Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba) who preach at her church embrace Jeffrey \u2014 or, as they know him, \u201cJohn Zorn\u201d \u2014 with the open-hearted naivet\u00e9 that only church people can have. If Leigh has any reservations about \u201cJohn\u2019s\u201d sudden appearance from \u201cNew York City,\u201d or his extremely fake-sounding job, she doesn\u2019t express them. This isn\u2019t a flaw in her character, but yet another symptom of a working-class exhaustion that\u2019s present, but never addressed, in the story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tatum and Dunst have good romantic chemistry, although Dunst really shines when \u201cRoofman\u201d briefly gets both more serious and more artfully shot late in the film. Her disappointment at learning that, no, she can\u2019t just have something good happen to her for once is devastating, and too little screen time is dedicated to it. It\u2019s all part of a moral footnote that feels like an obligation \u2014\u00a0OK, fine, maybe it\u2019s not cool to be a criminal, even if you are smart and charming and unusually agile\u00a0\u2014 compared to the film\u2019s comedic scenes. Of these, Peter Dinklage emerges as an underdog MVP as the store\u2019s dickhead manager, particularly in a scene where he catches Jeffrey naked and showering in the men\u2019s room sink. On the whole, however, \u201cRoofman\u201d is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Buzz around \u201cRoofman\u201d will undoubtedly focus on its true-crime elements, as well as the reconstituted Toys \u201cR\u201d Us store where much of the film takes place. Nostalgia is one thing, but if you really think about it, there\u2019s something perverse about taking the husk of a chain store driven to bankruptcy by leveraged buyouts and rebuilding it using money from a movie studio partially owned by a private equity firm to tell the life story of a man who, by his own recounting, became a thief because he couldn\u2019t provide for his children by doing things \u201cthe right way.\u201d The difference is, Jeffrey Manchester went to prison for what he did.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: C+<\/p>\n

\u201cRoofman\u201d premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Paramount will release the film in theaters on Friday, October 10.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film reviews<\/a><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts? Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Plenty of crime films make breaking the law look glamorous, but few are as wholesome as \u201cRoofman.\u201d Director…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[40854,88,2695,206,900,86512,46686],"class_list":["post-139420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-channing-tatum","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-roofman","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}