FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Uncle John’

The cop from “Beverly Hills Cop” that’s not Eddie Murphy or Judge Reinhold is “Uncle John,” a real salt of the earth kind of guy, who leads a simple life doing some carpentry work and getting coffee with the boys at the local diner out in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and is it his fault that’s he’s also a murderer? Cause he’s a nice guy, no reason to paint him with this broad brush because of this one thing, amiright America?

The movie starts with the murder of a guy named Dutch, and we see that the murderer is John (a fantastic John Ashton). Thinking on his feet, he disposes of the body and does a pretty damn good job actually. And for the rest of the movie there’s an Edgar Allen Poe “The Tell Tale Heart” kind of vibe, as his friends speculate about the fella’s disappearance and possible death and he has to pretend that he hasn’t even seen the guy in years. And due to past history, Dutch’s grieving brother Danny (Ronnie Gene Blevins, doing his best sweaty Peter Sarsgaard) thinks (correctly) that John has something to do with Dutch’s disappearance, and that just lays a whole other layer of menace on top of everything for John.

Meanwhile there’s Ben (Alex Moffat), who is John’s nephew. He lives a few hours away in Chicago where he works for some company doing animation for commercials, and he meets a new coworker named Kate (Jenna Lyng), and they have a weird kind of friendship in which they are the last to know among everyone with eyes that they are going to get together as a couple. They have past histories that they are trying to get over, Kate more than Ben, and they hang out as friends and get along pretty swell, but they don’t hook up right away. And then on a whim they decide to take a road trip to get some donuts from Ben’s old home town and also drop in on Uncle John and sees how he’s doing. Which is, of course, bad timing for John.

For the most part, “Uncle John” feels like two movies in one. First, there’s the movie about this John fella, the murder he committed, the possible “why” of the murder, and his feelings of guilt as he tries to hide his actions from everyone around him, which is hard enough to do normally let alone when you live in a tony town in which everyone knows everyone else. This story gets really tense as we follow John around and he sees Danny kind of stalking him and the local police show up on occasion to talk to him, and this has all the trappings of a standard, well made, rural-set thriller.

And then there is the second movie that they cutting away to, which is the story of Ben and his blossoming friendship with Kate. At first we meet Ben and one of his hipster coworker buddies and they have a little pop culture talk about D’Angelo and vegan cake, and then Kate is introduced and she and Ben start working together and hit it off in a friendly way. It is obvious Ben likes Kate because we see him look up her Facebook profile and check her relationship status, and every time they communicate he’s full of jokes, always trying to make her laugh, and actually it seems to work, and she seems to dig him, but she also puts up a built of a wall and tries to keep it in the friend zone because she got out of a bad relationship and doesn’t want to settle down again. Fair enough. So they go out drinking and talking, and Ben wants to hook up and she kind of doesn’t. So this is a whole mumblecore type of story, which is to say that it is a movie about 20-somethings and their relationships and how these things evolve with each conversation and encounter.

And this isn’t a bad thing at all, but it does feel like we are leaving the Uncle John story to check out the story of Ben and Kate, and it takes quite awhile for the two stories to finally intersect, at which point “Uncle John” finally feels like one, cohesive movie, as Ben and Kate unwittingly put themselves in the middle of a situation involving revenge and murder. Really I think I would have liked a more fleshed out version of just John’s story, and they could have left all that Ben and Kate stuff out because ultimately it is easily the least interesting of the two stories. Hell, the Ben and Kate story doesn’t even come with much drama – there is the prerequisite scene in which Ben makes a move and gets rebuffed and then things are slightly awkward between the two of them later, but even that awkwardness gets mitigated pretty quickly and they go back to being friends. They both seem like nice people and it makes sense for them to try being a couple and it is pleasant to see them interact, but there is a real lack of tension with these scenes. Hell, Ben and Kate both come across as very nice, likable people with a lack of any real flaws, just the standard “I’m not sure what I want right now” kind of indecisiveness that is not uncommon at among people of this age.

Meanwhile the Uncle John scenes back in the country are almost nothing but tension and drama. We learn just a little bit about his sister and her untimely end and how that changed John, and how it informs how he acts in the present of this movie, and we also get some more interesting little insights into who he is and what his life is like, like when he keeps getting hit on by one of his neighbors cum customers, or the short hand he has with his friends in the community. He seems like a very nice but very lonely guy, but one who seems resigned to his loneliness. John is a very interesting character, and the murder just makes everything even more compelling. This movie seems to have more to say about the nature of man regardless of circumstance or environment than it does about the romantic proclivities of a pair of millennials.

So “Uncle John” is good though I can’t shake the feeling that movie could have been great if only it was more focused. As it is, the connections between the two stories are tenuous at best, and where this could have been a really fascinating exploration of a character who felt compelled or forced to do something terrible instead comes across as a little more than a half-baked film. Still, some very solid direction and great work from John Ashton still makes this a movie worth watching, and also makes first time writer/director Steven Piet someone to keep an eye out for in the future.

Click here for my coverage of the 2015 Florida Film Festival.