Who is Cletis Tout? (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Richard Dreyfuss is seen in prison. He was once a professional illusionist who turned into a criminal mastermind. Imagine David Copperfield using his detailed illusions for criminal gain. For example, Dreyfuss robs a bank in broad daylight, but has an air-tight alibi. He was seen performing in the courtyard outside the bank during the robbery, in full view of hundreds of people. It's a pretty cool premise, and the same ingenuity engineers a comical, daring prison break.

Christian Slater plays an imprisoned forger who helps Dreyfuss break out of the big house. In his own former criminal career, Slater was also a genius in his field. He had managed to devise a perfect false documents scam. His partner was a coroner. The coroner would frequently determine an identification for an anonymous body but would officially claim it was unidentifiable, passing the true ID along only to Slater, who then used that identity to create a perfect set of false documents for someone else, confident that the real owner would never come along to blow anyone's cover. Sweet!

After their prison break, Slater and Dreyfuss contact the coroner, who sets them up with the identities of recent corpses, but there is a major snag. Slater takes on the ID of a guy who was hit by the mob. When the underworld guys accidentally get wind of Slater's presence, they think their successful hit was not so successful after all, and they bring in their #1 hit man, Critical Jim (Tim Allen), to finish the task.

Critical Jim soon has Slater tied up in a hotel room, and is waiting for the mob to pay him before he finishes the kill. Luckily for Christian Slater, the mob guys are a little slow in making the transfer to Critical Jim's bank account, so the two men use the time to swap stories.

Slater points out that he's not who Jim thinks, and tells his whole story from the prison break up until that point.

That story also involves millions of dollars worth of diamonds which had been hidden by Dreyfuss before he was arrested, and a budding romance between Slater and Dreyfuss's daughter (Portia de Rossi). As you can guess from the presence of lost diamonds, two lovers, a bunch of mob guys, an army of cops, and four criminal masterminds (the two cons, the coroner, and Critical Jim), the scheming can get very elaborate.

That all sounds contrived, doesn't it? On paper, it sounds too complicated, and it seems to cross over into too many unrelated genres. It's a caper picture, it's a farce, it's a romantic comedy, and it's a flamboyant Tarantinoesque crime story. It also uses a circular narrative, ala Tarantino, to present the already complicated story, using flashbacks within flashbacks, making it all so convoluted you need a program to score the game.

To make matters worse, the romantic pairing between Christian Slater and Portia de Rossi doesn't work at all.

Despite all that, I found the movie very engaging. It has a big heart, Billy Connelly is hilarious as the coroner, and Tim Allen is a hoot as Critical Jim, the hit man who is also a film geek. The script uses Critical Jim's love of films to comment on the story which Slater tells him. Since the story which Slater relates to Critical Jim is also the plot of this film, Critical Jim is also being critical of the very film in which he is also a character. By the end of the film, Jim loves Slater's story, believes it, and most important, thinks it could make a good movie. Therefore, he can't kill Slater, because ... well, because Slater is the good guy.

In a sense, Cletis Tout is to caper films as Scream is to horror movies. It uses Critical Jim's voice to tell you what a genre fan should have expected at any given time, and why it did or didn't happen in this particular movie.

Despite some flaws, I found it consistently charming, warm, and sometimes very funny.