Who is Cletis Tout? (2002)

Starring: Christian Slater, Tim Allen, Richard Dreyfuss, Portia de Rossi, RuPaul, and Billy Connolly
Grade: F

There’s something about Christian Slater I don’t like. I don’t know how he plays sympathetic protagonists because his general facial expression bothers me. He looks and sounds like a sleazy car salesman trying to screw you on a deal. These thoughts continue in Who is Cletis Tout?.

Summary

After an opening with two gangsters discussing Deliverance and how one of them wouldn’t mind having sex with Burt Reynolds, we jump to a movie theater where we see hitman Critical Jim (Allen) tearing up to the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

There are only two things that Jim loves: his job and old movies.

His beeper goes off, so he leaves the theater and shows up at the hotel room of Trevor Finch (Slater), pointing a gun at his head as soon as he opens the door. From what we learn from Finch’s narration, Jim thinks Finch is the infamous “Cletis Tout”. Over the phone, Jim tells the bad guys he has Cletis Tout, and they have 90 minutes to transfer his money, or he’ll let him go. After this, he goes back to the apartment where we see he has Finch tied to a chair. Jim left the television on for him to watch The Great Escape.

This tells us Finch has been there for a while because The Great Escape was long as hell.

Anyway, as Jim talks about his love for old movies because of their focus on important storytelling compared to newer movies, Finch piques his interest with his own personal story. One that involves a prison break, a jewel heist, and a girl. Jim tells Finch to “pitch” the story to him and if he’s entertained enough, he may buy Finch some time. Finch goes right into it and the rest of the film is played as a series of flashbacks within flashbacks interwoven into the present time to see Critical Jim’s reaction.

It was 1977 in New York City at the city’s diamond exchange. It was closing time. A young street magician named Micah Tobias (Tim Progosh, who looks a lot like Albert Brooks) performs for a small crowd and even the security workers at the diamond exchange watch from inside. He does this trick where he disappears and reappears inside of a giant balloon. However, this “reappearance” inside of the balloon is only a film projection of Tobias. Everyone assumes it’s the real Tobias and part of the act, but the actual Tobias uses this projection to distract everyone. The balloon is on top of a manhole cover, allowing Tobias to use this intricate plan to jump into the hole and break into the exchange through the bathroom. No one suspects a thing because they’re all watching the projection. As everyone is distracted outside, Tobias is able to handcuff the only guard looking over everything. He then steals a shitload of diamonds, escapes, and reappears for the end of his act right before the guard is able to trigger the alarm. Following this simple escape, he picks up his daughter from school and they flee the area. Eventually, they go to some random field, and Tobias digs up a hole to put the diamonds in. His daughter gives him a picture and a feather he would use for tricks to entertain her, and he puts them also in the box with the diamonds.

We fast forward to almost three weeks before the present day. This is when Finch enters the picture. He was serving seven years in a federal prison in North Carolina for things like fraud and forgery for passports and other documents. Essentially, he gave people new identities. At this same prison, a now much older Tobias (Dreyfuss) is serving twenty-five years for his diamond heist. Its market value is 4.5 million dollars, and it’s never been recovered. Now, in an exchange for a million dollars, Finch helps with getting items and helping plan an escape for Tobias. Following almost getting into a fight with a prisoner named Henry, we jump to nighttime. Tobias gives Finch one last offer to join him, but he says he’ll wait it out. The next day, the plan commences. Tobias uses a film projection (one of the items Finch got for him) to make it look like he’s trying to escape during some routine yardwork and during the distraction, he steals the truck of the guards and knocks everything else over. During the commotion, he sees Henry with a knife about to pounce on Finch, so he hits Henry with the car door. In the heat of the moment, Finch jumps into the truck with Tobias. Eventually, they are able to jump off a bridge and onto a train to escape. Later, Finch calls his old friend Mikey (Connolly), saying he needs to escape the area. To pull this off, he needs a kit and a body. Mikey agrees to help and will do what he can for Tobias.

At this point, we jump out of the flashback for a moment because Critical Jim realizes Finch isn’t Cletis Tout. According to Finch, Tout was a “bottom-feeder” who called himself a video journalist but was a “thug with a camera” who worked alone. His client list included tabloid shows and his mark was “anybody who made their living in the public eye”.

There was a bachelor party for mobster, and head of the Vissari crime family Paulie the Fist’s son, Rowdy Virago. Since Virago was untouchable but also a bit of a celebrity who loved the limelight, Tout made it his mission to bring down Virago. That night of the bachelor party, Tout tails Virago back to his loft party. During this party, Virago accidentally strangles a hooker…

Classic.

Tout recorded this whole mess and made three copies: one for himself, the other for a neighbor, and the other for Paulie the Fist. The Vissari crime family thought they were safe because they already disposed of the body, but Tout has just made things difficult. They have two of their guys kill Tout (the ones who discussed having sex with Burt Reynolds in the opening). The car is set ablaze from a cut gas line and the gangsters’ lit cigarettes. Soon after, the cops involved with the case all meet and discuss the facts before the coroner gets in the room. The cops found nothing about the male (because he’s burnt beyond recognition), but they’re pretty sure the female was strangled. Dr. Savian walks in the room and comes to the conclusions we already know about the female but tells the cops he needs more time with the male to figure it out. He then gets a call. It’s from Finch. This is the phone call from earlier. Finch’s friend Mikey is Dr. Savian. That night, Mikey/Dr. Savian meets with Finch and Tobias and tells Finch this will be a freebie because Finch never snitched on him when he could have. He gives them all the tools they need to falsify documents, except for Finch’s guy’s passport number. He tells Finch that’ll be his job because he’s having trouble with it. He does give Tobias the new name of “Marcel Zavoya”, a dead guy who’s head they found in an oven. Thankfully, he has a passport number for him. He then gifts Finch his name: Cletis Tout.

Are the wheels starting to turn for you yet?

Mikey tells Finch he may have to break into Tout’s house to find his passport. Finch is cool with it. Since him and Tobias will be in the area for a couple more weeks to clear up some affairs, Mikey also lends them $10,000 in cash and wishes them good luck. He says they can stay the night, but he never wants to hear from them again (for everyone’s safety). Once Finch sets everything up and creates all the documents for the two of them after Mikey leaves, he plans on going to Tout’s place to find his passport. Before he leaves, he asks Tobias when he plans on grabbing the diamonds, but they are interrupted by Tobias’s daughter Tess (Rossi) who came to greet him. He leaves them to catch up and goes over to Tout’s place. Trying to get in his apartment, Tout’s neighbor Ginger (RuPaul) flirts with him and creeps him out. Apparently, Ginger is the neighbor that Tout sent one of the tapes too, and he opened it anyway despite Tout’s instructions not to. Clearly, Ginger is unaware of what Tout actually looks like because he just assumes Finch is him. He gives Finch the tape and invites him over anytime he wants. Weirded out, Finch enters Tout’s apartment and begins the search. Some old woman neighbor observed their conversation in the hallway and immediately contacts a detective who asked her to call if Cletis Tout ever came by. The corrupt detective calls the Vissari family and tells them they killed the wrong guy, and the “real” Tout is in the building. He makes sure to tell them not to kill Tout in the building but if they have to, they have to kill the old lady neighbor that called him too.

The two gangsters that killed Tout earlier are sent after Finch, and they’re in hot water with the rest of the family because it’s assumed they killed the wrong guy. Finch can’t find the passport and escapes the apartment.

Once he gets back to Tobias and Tess, Finch also notes he has a feeling he’s being followed (because he is). Tobias changes the subject to tell Finch he has a plan to go after the diamonds together. Finch isn’t cool with this though because Tess knows about everything. Since he’s the career criminal, he doesn’t think Tess will be of any help. Regardless, they plan things at a pottery shop Tess breaks into, and Finch continues to complain. Just then, the gangsters shoot up the pottery shop and Tobias is hit. They try to drive him to safety and though he gets some last words out, getting Finch to promise to take care of Tess, he dies. Without the man that brought them together, Finch and Tess have to work together to find the diamonds, and in the process, they start to like each other. Meanwhile, the mob finds out the two gangsters still didn’t kill Tout, so the Vissari family hires Critical Jim.

In the present time, Critical Jim is hanging onto every word of Finch’s true story, but the telling of what actually happened gets Jim to start rethinking some things.

My Thoughts:

Who is Cletis Tout? is one of those movies where you wonder how they managed to get a cast like this for such a strange, low-budget, below-average film.

It starts with the naming of the characters. Cletis Tout might be one of the ugliest names I’ve ever heard. As we wrap our head around this, we’re introduced to the hitman hired to kill our protagonist. He’s not bothered by the name because he is known by an equally ridiculous name in Critical Jim.

What a way to set the tone.

Oddly enough, Critical Jim is the best part of the movie. Sadly, Tim Allen is woefully underutilized in the role. Most of the film is about Finch’s escapades and the diamond plot, but the problem is that it’s just not very compelling. Christian Slater isn’t likable enough, the romance is kind of there and kind of not, and Richard Dreyfuss leaves the movie too early. The narrative wasn’t the mystery the title makes it out to be either. We found out who Cletis Tout is fairly early into the film, so I didn’t find anything that happened afterwards as particularly shocking. In terms of humor, the only truly funny parts were the two bumbling gangsters hired to kill Tout and their stupid conversations. Nothing else gels as it should. We rely heavily on the flashback to make up the narrative, and Jim notes that the “flashback” sequence gets too much shit. He thinks it’s underrated and can work if used right in movies. Clearly, this was a point that first time writer/director Chris Ver Wiel was trying to make. He put it to use to try and make things feel out of the ordinary, and it did work. The film is very different, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. The story didn’t warrant this intriguing of a narrative structure, and the best parts of the movie were the present-day interactions between Finch and Critical Jim.

Can you believe that? The disappointing part is the flashback, but it’s 90% of the movie.

A good way to fix Who is Cletis Tout? is to make it even weirder. Critical Jim’s quirk is quoting classic Hollywood films, naming facts about them, and the actors/actresses/directors involved. A good way to make this character a little bit more interesting was if he quoted cult classic movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space or movies from the modern era (or even from the classic period) that people forgot about like Eraserhead or something. Quoting the most quotable movie ever in Casablanca doesn’t impress me. That’s like playing the Rocky theme and being like, “Do you know what movie this is from?”. Then, when you add more depth to him in this sense, they should’ve made him ultraviolent to the point where it’s a bit chilling. We know he loves his job of being a hitman because it’s stated early on. So, they should show us! We see in one scene Jim is slightly unhinged, giving Finch his gun to kill the two bad guys entering the room because it would be excellent depth to Finch’s character in his story. When Finch refuses, he kills the two with no problem. This is crazy behavior, but it’s passed off as a joke when it could’ve been a turning point of the movie. It’s a shame really because Allen was game for it. You can tell he was enjoying himself because of how different the role was to anything he’s played before. It had a lot of potential, but the flashbacks take up too much of the run time.

Critical Jim is just the beginning of the long list of missed opportunities in this film, and it shows. Honestly though, it’s not even worth talking about. There’s no saving the story, and Slater was wrong for the starring role. When you miss out on these two MAJOR components, a movie can’t really recover. Look, I’m not saying Who is Cletis Tout? had the potential to be something great, but it definitely could’ve been a lot better. If someone asked me “How would you have fixed this movie?”, I could write a ten-page article on it with sources. There were some intriguing elements at play and a very solid cast, but it’s as if not a SINGLE fuck was given once they signed everyone to the film. The entire production screamed laziness.

On a side note, I just find it very hard to believe that all Tess wanted was the fucking picture from the buried box. Finch offered her a share of the diamonds (that’s worth millions), and she was perfectly fine with just the picture? Come on man! There’s not a shot in hell anyone would be cool with that tradeoff no matter how sentimental you may be!

Also, for those tuning in for RuPaul, he’s only in it for two scenes despite being on the poster.