Best Laid Plans (1999) Review

When a robbery goes very wrong for Nick he must do something to get money before everything unravels. The web of passion, crime and possible murder are not what they expected and thought everything was going to be very simple and straightforward.

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Best Laid Plans has plenty of twists and turns as it moves through the story and we are shown flashbacks to how the plan came about. Bryce is an old college friend of Nick’s and one night after they had been out drinking together he meets Lissa and takes her back home and has sex with her. Then panics when she accuses him of rape, then panics even more when finding a driving licence which states she is only 16. He then ties her up and calls Nick to come round.

That was certainly not what Nick was expecting and we quickly discover that she is actually his girlfriend. This is when we find out that he is in a lot of trouble when it comes to money, after a robbery he got involved with went very wrong, so because he is such an amazing person decides to try and get money out of Bryce. Obviously he had no idea he would snap and tie her up in a panic and then threaten to murder her so it doesn’t all get out.

At this point I realised that all of the characters within the film were just utterly horrible with nothing nice about them at all. That is when it made it all more difficult due to not caring about them and actually hoping something would happen to them as that’s all they actually deserved. A few more twists came towards the end which made them all even more horrible!

I will give it a little bit of credit that the actual main storyline was quite interesting and could have made for a rather dramatic outburst and how it was going to end up. But with that initial con then it was never really going to be all that.

In terms of the cast it was pretty decent, Alessandro Nivola really has got a rather varied filmography and quite frankly I didn’t actually realise he had been in so many films! A young Reese Witherspoon which was in all honesty the reason I was shocked I hadn’t even heard of this one before. Then you throw in Josh Brolin who was decent enough, the thing is though they didn’t really all gel together that well but I guess that is hard with unlikeable characters.