One of the common traits of the great modern pulp filmmakers—like Quentin Tarantino, Shane Black, and, yes, Rian Johnson—is that whatever they steal from the popular culture they love they then convert into work that feels personal and distinctive, not derivative. Sure, their characters sometimes talk like they learned English from Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard novels. But beneath all the bluster and patter, they’re actually saying something: about who they are, about what they want, and about how the world as it is currently constructed makes it so damn hard for any ordinary slob to catch a break.
On one level, this week’s Poker Face feels like an exercise in genre mashup, replete with surface pleasures but maybe not too deep. The episode is about a couple of people who try using movies as a blueprint for their lives. In one corner? Kendall Hines (Sam Richardson), a wannabe screenwriter and cinephile who thinks he knows enough about heist films to pull off a robbery. In the other corner? Charlie Cale, who follows the advice of her rom-com-obsessed co-worker, Jenny Singh (Geraldine Viswanathan), to win the heart of a guy she’s been flirting with—who just happens to be Kendall’s boss, Bill Jackson (Corey Hawkins).
Taofik Kolade’s script (directed by Adam Arkin, who just like last week, brings a lot of visual pop) cleverly brings these two storylines together, as Kendall’s big job ends with Bill dead, on the same weekend he had a very nice date with Charlie. Naturally, Charlie tries to figure out what happened. Kendall, who is no criminal genius (no matter how many crime movies he’s seen), proves pretty easy to foil.
I would argue that the ease with which Charlie gives Kendall comeuppance is in line with the overall point of “One Last Job.”It’s why I found it unexpectedly profound. The theme the episode explores isn’t hard to spot. The whole plot hinges on characters coming to the cold realization that real life isn’t as much like the movies as they’d hoped. This is hardly some deep insight; and yet something about the way the story develops and the way the actors play it really connected with me.
Let’s start with Richardson, a favorite of mine for a while, probably best-known for his performances in Veep and Ted Lasso (though he should be best known for Detroiters). Richardson is a skilled comic actor, but a lot of what makes him so funny is the undertone of desperation he so often plays. His Kendall is too scared to make the move out to Hollywood, so he sticks around a SuperSave big-box store with his childhood friend Bill. It’s when Bill fires him—to give him a kick out of the nest—that Kendall falls under the spell of Juice (James Ransone), a career criminal who convinces him to rob the SuperSave on Thanksgiving weekend, when there should be around $200,000 in the vault. (It’s actually more like $400,000…which proves to be a problem.)
Natasha Lyonne is good as always, playing somewhat against type as a rom-com gal. Jenny (played with a scarily mounting intensity by Viswanathan, another of the great comic actors to emerge in the past decade) helps get Charlie into the mind of a romantic lead, teaching her the secrets to “how to win a man without seeming crazy.” Charlie is so hot for Bill—a frequent customer of the Indian restaurant where Jenny and Charlie work—that she’ll do anything Jenny suggests. (How anxious is Charlie to hop into bed with Bill? When Jenny tries to teach her about “the leave-behind” trick, where a woman leaves something behind at her date’s place so she’ll have an excuse to return, Charlie hungrily suggests, “Like my chastity?” Jenny: “No, something valuable.”)
Jenny’s best advice is to ask if Bill has “a nerdy, non-threatening co-worker.” That’s how Charlie first meets Kendall. She spends a lot of time in the SuperSave too, after she finds out that Bill—still reeling from a recent breakup—has been secretly living there. They have their dinner-date (and post-prandial coitus) in his makeshift living area, where Bill tells her a lot of things that will eventually help her crack the case. For example, she learns that Bill loves working at the SuperSave and the ins and outs of the store’s security.
Bill, because he is living in the store, catches Kendall in the middle of the Black Friday heist. Juice then callously shoots Bill dead and hides the body by swapping it for a creepy Santa mannequin. Juice figures that with Bill and the money missing, everyone will figure that Bill stole the loot. (Hiding the body in the middle of the store would seem to undercut this plan, but hey, no one said Juice was a mastermind.)
Charlie finds out about the robbery when she’s called to deliver food to the crime scene, where she immediately smells bullshit. Why would Bill rob a place he loved so much? And doesn’t that Black Santa in the middle of the Christmas display look a lot like…? [Cue Charlie screaming.]
I said that this story is about how real life isn’t like the movies, and while that provides the dark punchline to “One Last Job,” the larger joke of this episode is that so much of it is filled with movie references. It’s set during the Christmas season, just like Die Hard and nearly every major film that Shane Black has written and/or directed. Juice offers to buy Kendall some mojitos, just like the characters in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. Kendall is an inside man; and when he gets fired, he tosses his vest, just the way George Clooney does with his tie in Out Of Sight. Juice kills Bill. And a lot of the tricks Kendall and Juice pull to evade security and get into the SuperSave vault are stolen from heist pictures.
Kendall’s downfall is also very much the stuff of crime movies. First, he has to stow the excess loot in his locker, which he can’t access because the whole employee area has been cordoned off by the cops. Then, when Juice discovers that their take was much larger than Kendall said, the two have a violent standoff, in which Juice’s gun jams before Kendall accidentally stabs him with a samurai sword (shades of Pulp Fiction). Criminals undone by their own short-sightedness are a staple of this genre.
But Richardson and Lyonne certainly play their characters as though what they’re experiencing is surprising and soul-shattering. What I liked most about this episode—and what I’m enjoying about this season—is that while it smashes together a bunch of references and movie modes, it’s not particularly beholden to any one. Towards the end of season one, I felt this show began to find its own voice once it weaved away from being a mere Columbo homage and figured out how to tell stories in a Poker Face-y way, taking advantage of the shorter running time, the varied locations, and the unique blend of optimism and dissatisfaction that defines Charlie Cale.
In the climactic sequence, Charlie catches Kendall when he returns to the SuperSave after dark to retrieve his money. Before the cops can arrive, the two of them face off again against Juice, who has lurched back to the store with the sword still in his back and a machine gun in his hand. Charlie pulls a “Lady from Shanghai” on him, putting her own face onto the banks of televisions (plus the actual The Lady From Shanghai) to create a mirror-maze effect, confusing him until he finally loses enough blood to die. Then as Kendall tries to flee—while the closing scene from Heat plays on the TVs—he is cornered by the police and sees all his cash go flying into the air, The Killing-style.
Kendall seems genuinely dismayed by how everything turned out—but not more than Charlie, who never intended to be part of a heist movie. She was happily enjoying her rom-com life, wearing sexy black lingerie under her date-night outfit and using her lie-detecting powers to sense Bill’s sincerity when he thanked her for giving him a present. And then, inevitably, she stumbled into a Poker Face episode.
Stray observations
- • Another example of an actor way overqualified for a small role: The talented Grasie Mercedes, from the much-missed Grand Crew, has just a few lines as a police officer.
- • Indicative of the movie-like unreality in which this episodes mostly dwells: Right after Kendall is told he’s losing his job due to the rise in thefts in the SuperSave chain, he walks out onto the sales floor and sees Juice, in plain sight, loading five 55-inch TVs into a cart.
- • Kendall takes his life cues from the Mission: Impossible movies, putting a “What Would Ethan Hunt Do?” sticker on his locker and setting the combination to the order of his favorite installments. (It’s 4-6-1-3. Charlie call this “questionable.”) He also tests Charlie’s worthiness as a potential romantic partner for Bill by asking her to pick the best M:I. (Charlie picks the first one, which is correct.)
- • Kendall may ultimately be a bad guy, but he does make sure that SuperSave has a robust physical-media section, and he reflexively turns off motion-smoothing whenever he encounters it on some random TV. Is he really such a monster?
- • “This is exactly how Edgar Wright wants you to watch his film.”
