Out of the Blue

There is something undeniably romantic about film noir that that makes Neil LaBute’s Out Of The Blue one of his most alluring cinematic concoctions to date.

The film’s simply a bit off-kilter—written with influences blatantly on its sleeves yet uninterested in subverting any assumptions that fact guarantees. I must be missing something.

Like most of LaBute’s work, Out of the Blue is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine.

Its dialogue is constructed in a way that would sound unnatural even in a daytime soap opera, and Kruger works her best to save it, but there’s only so much she can do. The story is so poorly developed it feels like an outline of a script, all in favor of a final plot twist that would be jaw-dropping…in the 1930s.

The general idea here is a sound one, taking the conventions of a celebrated genre and sending them up. But LaBute’s incessant grasping for laughs out of “The Next Tuesday” and “Sometime After That” titles is instantly cloying.

There’s no question writer-director Neil LaBute’s effort doesn’t catch fire.

Maybe if you hate movies, LaBute’s attempt to bore us to death with classic noir material is a nifty prank. For anyone else, you’re better off revisiting Garfield and Turner, or Stanwyck and MacMurray, or Hurt and Turner — or even “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”