A Bag of Hammers has a good heart, containing funny and sweet moments, but when I walked out, I found myself disliking it. A lot. It’s one of those quirky indie dramedies that you would find at Sundance, filled with quirky people doing quirky things in a quirky situation. Sometimes, there’s a good balance struck and then sometimes it can get unbearable. A Bag of Hammers falls in the latter part of this category, especially the final act.
Jason Ritter and Jake Sandvig (who also co-wrote the movie) star as best friends Ben and Alan, who make their living posing as a valet service and stealing the cars of the bereaved for profit. Alan’s sister Mel (Rebecca Hall) chastises them for this, as she herself works a real job at a breakfast diner where she has to do a little dance every time she greets a customer. Quirky jobs? Check and check. Ben and Alan are content with living their carefree lives, but end up getting entangled with Kelsey (Chandler Canterbury), the young son of an unemployed woman named Lynette (Carrie Preston), who is renting their guest house while searching for a job. After failing miserably to find gainful employment, Lynette commits suicide and Ben and Alan decide to essentially kidnap Kelsey, in an effort to make sure that child services can’t ruin his life by throwing him from foster home to foster home. It’s a movie about growing up and what it means to be a family, and all sorts of other indie nonsense.
There is some good in A Bag of Hammers. Ritter and Sandvig make a great comedy duo, feeding off of each other perfectly. The comedic moments are clever and hit more often than miss. Preston is great as well; Lynette is a rather unsympathetic character, and her role helps reinforce Kelsey’s horrible life. Towards the end of her time in the movie, when she is so desperate that she offers to sleep with Ben and Alan to pay for rent, her role is particularly effective and you begin to somewhat empathize with her.
And then as soon as she’s out of the picture, A Bag of Hammers becomes one of those “we wanted to raise the child, but the child raised US” kind of movies and flips in-and-out of humor and somewhat intense drama. All the momentum it built up slowly fades out, and the movie becomes somewhat unbearable to watch. There are still some entertaining scenes, like Ben’s failed attempts at small-time crime, but it starts to drag and when it finally reaches its unsatisfying conclusion, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. There is an overarching theme of what it means to be a family and to grow up that ties everything together, but it has been done before and a lot better.
A Bag of Hammers charmed some people here at SXSW, but I wasn’t one of them. It starts off strong, with Ritter and Sandvig absolutely killing it every time they are on-screen, but it eventually tailspins and leads to multiple endings that are thoroughly unsatisfying and flat-out stupid. I can stomach quirky from time to time, this just didn’t happen to be one of those occasions.