REVIEW/FILM OPINION – Shane Atkinson directs with “LaRoy” an excellent detective comedy for his first feature film, brilliantly mixing humor and drama for a very entertaining show and supported by a formidable cast.
LaRoya successful first
Before its release in French cinemas on April 17, 2024the black comedy LaRoy by Shane Atkinson was the sensation of the 2023 Deauville Festival. He left crowned with a prestigious triplet: Grand Jury Prize, Audience Prize and Critics’ Prize. It was thus written that we would see him again quickly: Shane Atkinson was present at Reims Polar 2024 to open it with LaRoy. Out of competition, logically, after his raid in Deauville, because he would then have biased the competition of this 4th International Police Film Festival.
With LaRoyhis first feature film after two notable shorts, Shane Atkinson has made a film like the ones he loves, a film with a first crime and a detective, located in an imaginary Texan town, between reality and the fantasy that we in a: dust, dry sun and dark nights, empty streets with motels whose neon lights crackle and paint is peeling.
Here, in LaRoy, Ray, a nice loser cuckolded by his former beauty queen wife, is ready to shoot himself in the head when he is mistaken for a hitman. A gun in one hand, the money from the contract in the other, he will then put his finger on a dramatic mechanism that is as violent as it is funny.
A great cast for a gritty drama
Before this presentation of Ray, played by an excellent John Magaro, and his sidekick the amateur detective Skip, equally excellent Steve Zahn, Shane Atkinson wrote and directed a tasty introduction, where we discover the real hitman , Harry. The opportunity for Dylan Baker to remind us with this portrait of a rigorous and psychopathic killer how he is a brilliant and underused actor. All cynicism and irony, playing in the shadows of the interior of a car, this introduction gives two important warnings: do not trust appearances, and do not play the smart one. And at the same time declares his love for the darkness and moral ambiguity of so-called detective cinema.
Shane Atkinson loves his characters, from the most useless to the most active. Those that we film in close-up and those of which we only keep the silhouette. Skip and Ray, two losers whose association is forced by Skip, are as funny as they are desperate in the very successful exercise of the clown duo. Ray displays his discomfort and his apparent weakness when Skip gains in recklessness and extravagance as the stakes of the intrigue become more serious. Around them, the secondary characters are just as well cared for by Shane Atkinson, special mention for Dylan Baker as well as Megan Stevenson and Matthew Del Negro, Ray’s wife and brother respectively, all stupidity and pettiness.
A human comedy like the Coen brothers
LaRoy is part of a genre influenced by the cinema of the Coen brothers, and he maintains a cousinship with Blood for blood And Fargo. The genius of the Coen brothers is to manage to draw from the almost banal mediocrity of the situations that they develop height of vision and metaphysical sensations. LaRoy does not succeed, or only in a flash, at the end of the dramatic mechanism which ends up stripping this human comedy to finally reveal the deep humanity of its protagonists.
But from this prestigious influence, LaRoy above all successfully takes on the taste of “average” characters confronted with real “Evil” and the absurdity of situations which defuses just enough of their violence and their sadness. So we laugh a lot, and we even end up getting emotional when Ray, as if tired of his perpetual time behind the action, finally takes things in hand. At this moment, still determined to save the one who does not love him, Skip rediscovers his friend, and he himself then takes on a new dimension for Ray.
Infidelity, murders, scams, friendship: so many threads that Shane Atkinson unravels with a consummate art of tragicomedy to make LaRoy a perfectly accomplished dark and funny thriller. LaRoy is entertainment not to be missed, a declaration of love for detective genre cinema, and above all a magnificent promise for the future.
LaRoy by Shane Atkinson, in theaters on April 17, 2024. Above is the trailer. Find all our trailers here.
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