\u201cLaRoy, Texas\u201d immediately tests your expectations. Driving down a dark dirt country road, Harry (Dylan Baker), whose car headlights are the only beacons of life amid the barren clime, passes a broken-down truck parked off-road. A few yards later, Harry spots the possible driver of the abandoned vehicle, picking up the stranded soul, a bearded, foreboding hitchhiker who looks like the beginning of a true-crime mystery. Baker is a curious choice for this role, an actor equally known for portraying hapless idiots and soulless pencil pushers. Here, he engages in cheery conversation; the mysterious hitchhiker half-heartedly jokes about the dangers of picking up strangers. Harry seems like an innocent, small-town fellow, deflecting the stranger\u2019s hypotheticals with an unassuming ease until turning the tables. Maybe, Harry asks, he purposefully damaged the hitchhiker\u2019s vehicle at a previous rest stop so he could pick him up.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a smart gambit of an opening scene by writer\/director Shane Atkinson. Harry is a hitman. And once he dispatches with his first victim\u2014one on a long list of many\u2014he is called for another job. This one, in the tiny brush town of LaRoy, Texas. Atkinson\u2019s hilarious feature debut is a barn burner of a western-thriller whose Coen Brothers-inspired nods give life to its meek protagonist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In another twist, the protagonist is not Harry. It\u2019s Ray (the quietly affecting John Magaro), a native of LaRoy, Texas. Early in the film, Ray meets with Skip (an endearing Steve Zahn), who\u2019s just begun a job as a private investigator. Skip is a bumbling, kindhearted idiot; he dresses in a Black cowboy hat and blazer, probably because he\u2019s watched one too many \u201cWalker, Texas Ranger\u201d episodes. But he does have important information: black and white photos of Ray\u2019s beauty queen wife Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson) stepping inside a seedy motel room. The revelation forces a shell-shocked Ray to please the demanding Stacy-Lynn by fulfilling her dream. He wants to fund her salon\u2014he just needs to find some cash.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ray is an all-too-trusting man. For one, he doesn\u2019t believe Stacy-Lynn could ever cheat on him. Worst yet, when he turns to his prickish brother Junior (Matthew Del Negro), who owns the family hardware store with Ray, for extra money, he buys Junior\u2019s cries of poverty despite his brother buying a brand new yacht for his palatial home. Ray is so pitiful he buys a gun so he might shoot himself in a strip joint\u2019s parking lot. By chance, however, a man jumps in his car with an envelope of cash to pay for a scheduled hit. Wanting to finally be somebody, Ray plays the part of Harry. He assassinates his target, is then thrown into a wider conspiracy involving a used car salesman, and then must retrieve a suitcase full of cash before Harry hunts him down\u2014all while trying to save his flatlining marriage.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cLaRoy, Texas\u201d is a convoluted yarn whose unnecessary intricacies aren\u2019t helped by Ray\u2019s unbelievable stupidity. Somewhere between not connecting the obvious dots of his wife\u2019s infidelity and believing that a salon will make it alright, the character jumps the shark to frustratingly insipid, to the point that you\u2019re ready to murder him, too. Thankfully, Magaro, is so excellent, so at ease playing vulnerable losers, that you\u2019re compelled to look past the writing\u2019s flaws. The same could be said of the chemistry between Magaro and Zahn. This is a film propelled by their unguarded male friendship, one shared by two unserious failures in need of someone to recognize their passions, desires, talents, and personhood. In each other, they find a worthy, moving mirror.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cLaRoy, Texas\u201d immediately tests your expectations. Driving down a dark dirt country road, Harry (Dylan Baker), whose car headlights are the only beacons of life amid the barren clime, passes a broken-down truck parked off-road. A few yards later, Harry spots the possible driver of the abandoned vehicle, picking up the stranded soul, a bearded, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[33,50,37],"class_list":["post-1310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-comedy","tag-crime","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}