Roofman

I once asked a senior detective at The Bay County Sheriff’s Office why all the criminals, when they had blown up their lives and were making their escapes, invariably came to Panama City Beach, Fla. 

My hometown of Panama City is next to the former Spring Break capital of the world and in the newsrooms I worked in it was a running joke that any semi famous criminal in the southeast would be caught in PCB. 

“Well, for all these guys, this was the last good memory they had,” he said. 

Meaning, that they had come to town as kids, partied hard as teens or college students, and in their lives this was as good as it got. 

But as life goes on these folks solve their problems by killing a spouse or a parent or by going on an amphetamine fueled gas and liquor store robbing spree. And they’ve got to go somewhere to escape the law that somewhere became my neck of the woods. 

Eventually, the local sheriff’s office or the US Marshal’s would find them in a tent by the day hotel room with a case of Natural Light and no particular plan. They usually went without any fuss. Most people go quietly, declining the option to go out in a hail of bullets and under a cloud of bad choices. 

You just get tired man. 

A large section of crime fiction is built on stories about people going on the lam. But the reality is is that it is hard work to keep out of sight and try and live either on the street or working the kinds of jobs that don’t ask a bunch of questions. 

Screenwriter John Rogers likes to say that in real life there are no Moriarty’s. 

Which makes the real life story of Roofman, Jeffery Manchester, so interesting. Everyone, even the cops, agree that he was a smart guy. First in how he committed his crimes: climbing into a fast food location before they open, using a gun to corral the clerks into a freezer and then taking the cash. 

He was clever again, in how he escaped prison. And once more in that he managed to live inside a Toys-R-Us for six months and go undetected. 

The movie doesn’t flinch from these crimes but it clearly wants us to side with Manchester. People point guns at one another in movies and television like it happens every day. In real life, it’s traumatic and can leave long lasting trauma. 

Yes, Manchester really was nice to all the people he threatened with a gun. He made sure everyone had their coats on when he stuck them in a freezer etc. 

But I had a hard time watching a married father do something as incredibly stupid as picking criminal for a career path. And then watching him romance a single mom when he was hiding out from the law after his prison break. 

Consider Alfred Hitchcock’s story about the audience knowing there is a bomb under a table. The audience will be tense or in Hitchcock’s terms “you’ve got them working.” 

Since I didn’t remember what really happened — and had no reason to believe the screenplay by Kirt Gunn, and Director Derek Cianfrance would follow the real life case all the way through and to exacting details — I was left wondering just how bad all of the final moments of this adventure in stupidity would be. 

You only find out how much of this is a recreation when you watch the real life interviews as the end credits role. 

So as a document of a real life event this is pretty good. And as a movie that is meant to entertain you it is also successful. 

If it has flaws they are mainly in how straightforward most of this is and in how there are not many twists and turns along the way. Real Life rarely delivers a surprise or extra complications for the hero in the third act. Things usually go about how you suspect they might. 

However, audiences do love to see people at work. Doctors, lawyers and cops have been the staple of television for decades mainly on just that principle. We like a good work show, if it tells us things we don’t normally get to see and if the actors involved are attractive enough. 

In this case, Roofman is a movie about a criminal who is on the job. That’s mostly compelling, even if I did spend a lot of my time shouting at everyone to get away from the bomb that was Jeffery Manchester’s messed up life.