There is nothing smart here.
One of the single funniest scenes in Jared Hess' Masterminds features Ken Marino attempting to breathe through his nose so as to not hurt the quality of the audio from the wire he's wearing for the FBI. The result is something akin to a whistle every time he takes a breath. It is a beautiful and wholly unintended reference to this week's Presidential Debate, Donald Trump's sniffling, and the resultant discussion.
Of course, while Masterminds is based on a true story, it isn't based on the debate, and the scene with Marino was assuredly filmed long before the debate occurred. The moment is funny by accident while the rest of Masterminds seems unfunny almost on purpose.
The tale stars Zach Galifianakis as David Ghantt, an armored truck driver, with a fiancée, Jandice (Kate McKinnon). David is convinced via a faked, by her, amorous connection with former co-worker, Kelly Campbell (Kristen Wiig), to help her and thief, Steve Chambers (Owen Wilson), rob the armored truck company. After getting away with $17 million dollars, David is then betrayed by them, not that he's smart enough to realize that Kelly has been lying to him all along.
This is the basic problem with the movie – the title is ironic and the vast majority of the jokes revolve around these characters, and just about everyone else with whom they come into contact, being fools. So, there are people like the ridiculous hitman, Mike McKinney (Jason Sudeikis); and Steve's foolish wife, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). The closest the movie gets to an intelligent character is Leslie Jones' FBI Agent, who seems more bemused by the rest than anything else. And, as funny as the Ken Marino moment is in the film, the actor is not a large part of the movie. Additionally, even that nose joke is based on the character being too dumb to realize that the whistling from his nose is worse than mouth-breathing ever could be.
To some extent, the best characters in the film, like those played by Marino and Jones, are the ones who appear the least. So, McKinnon's Jandice, with her preponderance of funny faces and weird notions, works relatively well. Jandice feels as equally developed as David, Kelly, and Steve. Or perhaps they feel as equally developed as Jandice. The same less is more notion is true of Sudeikis' McKinney, too – his first couple of scenes are amusing but as we see more of the character, the jokes wear thin.
It is certainly true that the screenplay from Chris Bowman & Hubbel Palmer and Emily Spivey does offer a couple of moments that will make virtually everyone in the audience laugh, but they are few, far between, and not worth the price of admission. For just over 90 minutes, Masterminds lumbers on, finding David on the run from the police in Mexico, Kelly feeling bad for him and the way she used him, and Steve determined to do whatever he must to ensure his own safety. Jones' FBI Agent is hard at work on the case, but her connecting the dots to Steve is made in a tossed off comment that exists solely to allow the plot to proceed without anyone thinking too deeply about it.
The film is most successful at making the audience feel bad for David – he has been used by Kelly and isn't smart enough to recognize it. Similarly, Kelly garners a whole lot of sympathy when she decides she has done the wrong thing and tries to walk it back. The sentimentality, however, outweighs the humor, and even if the jokes were good it would become difficult to laugh because they are at the expense of this sad sack set of characters. That being said, most of the jokes aren't terribly humorous in the first place.
For a movie so distinctly unfunny but overwhelmed by such a large preponderance of funny people, it may be no surprise that the greatest number of laughs are generated in the outtakes included at the end of the movie. If the entire movie were merely an extended version of these outtakes, Hess and company might have created a comedy for the ages.
The Verdict
Humor can be a difficult thing to achieve and, as the outtakes indicate, the set for Masterminds may have been an incredibly fun and funny place to be. That humor, however, doesn't translate to what is on the screen during the film proper. Nor can the movie boast that it is cleverly plotted, offering twists and turns to keep the audience guessing. It simply plods along going from one moment to the next, offering up everything that was pre-ordained in the film's opening moments, nothing more, and perhaps somewhat less.
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