The full extent of Channing Tatum’s charismatic powers fuel Roofman (now streaming on Paramount+, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a somewhat stranger-than-fiction BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie about a real-life criminal who robbed places by cutting through their roofs. He also was rather genial to the McDonald’s employees he locked in the freezer, and lived inside a fixture in a Toys ‘R’ Us store for a while after he broke out of prison. Yeah – it’s quite the story. The film also marks the return of filmmaker Derek Cianfrance, best known for exquisitely filmed miserable dramas Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, for his first directorial effort since 2016’s The Light Between Oceans; ostensibly a comedy, Roofman is his most crowdpleasing effort, but one with a dark enough fringe to match his M.O.
ROOFMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: In a heist movie, Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum) would be the case man, the guy who scopes out the setting of the prospective crime, crafting a plan that exploits the minutiae of routines, e.g., when the bank has the most cash, where the security cameras’ blind spots are, the routines of security guards, etc. Jeffrey knows McDonald’s restaurants have the most dough in their safes first thing in the morning, so he smashes holes in their roofs, hides until the first employees arrive, robs them, then kindly ushers them into the walk-in freezer, making sure they have their coats on first so they don’t get too cold. We meet Jeffrey in the midst of one of these heists, and when the McD’s manager doesn’t have a jacket to wear in the freezer, Jeffrey pulls off his own and hands it over. Sweet dude. Thoughtful. Too bad he’s a crook, right?
Jeffrey was inspired to do this out of desperation. He couldn’t afford a new bike for his daughter’s birthday, and seems to be struggling after a stint in the military, a vague struggle that doesn’t seem to pinpoint whether he can’t find a job or is just a restless sort who just doesn’t want a job. Regardless, he’s a smart, observant guy who just wants to do right by his wife and three kids and therefore wonders how many times he’ll have to bust into a Mickey D’s before he can provide a decent life for them. “Turns out, the answer is 45,” Jeffrey says in voiceover, and then the film cuts to TV-news reports about a serial robber who’s “terrorizing” his Charlotte, North Carolina community. He finally gets his daughter the bike, and almost in the same breath the cops show up and chase him with a pink feather boa flapping around his neck. His sentence is 45 years, and that’s a mighty long time.
Too long. Eventually, Jeffrey concocts an ingenious plan to smuggle himself out of prison via the undercarriage of a semi-truck. He sits on the street watching his daughter ride her bike from afar as a cop monitors her. The APB is out there. He tries not to act suspicious as he walks the streets, eventually hustling into a Toys “R” Us after a cop spots him. Jeffrey enters the men’s room and climbs up into the ceiling and waits it out. When the store closes for the night he climbs into the manager’s office and figures out how to stop the cameras from recording and eventually finds a big hollow display fixture where he tosses a couple of crib mattresses and a big stuffie Spider-Man so he’s not lonely; after a few days of subsisting on peanut M&Ms, he rigs up his own security system with baby monitors. It’s the perfect place to hide for six months while he waits for his military buddy Steve (LaKeith Stanfield) to get back into town and help him concoct a fake passport so he can skip the country.
In his little cubby-nest, Jeffrey wiles away some of the daytime hours by watching the employees on the monitors. The manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage), is a human butt who has no problem asserting his authorit-ahh and slathering condescension upon his employees. One of whom is Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), who’s miffed when Mitch refuses to donate to her church’s charity toy drive. So Jeffrey steals some toys and a bike and rides on over to make a donation – and meets a woman who’s obviously mollified by the sight of a tall handsome witty gentleman, and ropes him into attending a deeply cheesy service, where he’s paired up with Leigh, single, recently divorced, smiling, twinkle in her eye. There’s a great moment where Jeffrey attends a church “singles brunch” at Red Lobster and he’s the guest of honor of a dozen ladies just hoping to catch an eyeful. He and Leigh go out on a date. They sleep together. He meets and charms her daughters. He tells her his name is John Zorn (is that a reference for all the avant-garde jazz people out there?) and that he has a secret government job that won’t allow him to talk about it or where he lives. He’s falling in love and playing with fire but hey, it’s a far more enjoyable way to make six months go by than beating the batteries out of Tickle Me Elmo dolls. That just wasn’t a particularly constructive way to express his frustration.
Photo: Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Most lusciously ironic fact from the real story of Jeffrey Manchester, and I really hope Wikipedia is correct with this one: A clue that led to his capture was a fingerprint on a DVD of Catch Me If You Can. So cross that with Secret Mall Apartment and Risky Business, which Roofman winkingly references.
Performance Worth Watching: You gotta love when Tatum goes full-dramatic – see also: Dog, Foxcatcher and obviously the G.I. Joe films, especially the one with the nanobots – and Roofman may be the most emotionally complex role of his career, playing a good man with an apparent compulsion to do bad things, and it’s a performance that’ll quietly break your heart.
Memorable Dialogue: Steve assesses Jeffrey’s capabilities to do crimes: “You got the calculation down, but you’re just… goofy.”
Sex and Skin: Where have I seen Tatum’s gluteus before? Did we ever see them in full glory in the Magic Mikes? Can’t remember. Anyway, here they are. Along with brief upper-body lady nudity and a tame sex scene.
Photo: ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
Our Take: Roofman is very much a Tatum-and-Dunst effort. Their alchemical interactions give the movie the oomph it needs so it’s not just a what’s-this-crazy-guy-gonna-do-next movie; part of us hopes the crazy guy can figure out a way to make the love story portion of this crime story functionally happily-ever-after. But another part of us wants to see him pony up the metaphorical chunk of flesh for inflicting trauma on so many people via his selfish actions. Be grateful that Dunst ends up squeegeeing up our sympathies by pulling off a thoroughly loveable performance despite the relative flimsiness of the character – she’s brilliant at playing an exquisite everywoman who carries a little joy and a little pain on her face at all times. She doesn’t just give the film the moral grounding it needs – there’s no Bonnie in Leigh to enable Jeffrey’s Clyde – but gives us access to some of the story’s deeper emotional conflicts.
Entertaining as the film can be, Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn’s screenplay is admittedly a little thin. More screen time gives Dunst opportunities to deepen her character in ways the writing doesn’t, but supporting players Stanfield, Dinklage, Juno Temple and Ben Mendelsohn are grossly underused. The director also tends to flatten the tone unto generic accessibility, to even out the Jeffrey character’s tendencies for extreme sentimentality and outrageous compulsive behavior. I’m happy to report this isn’t a rote Jekyll-and-Hyde story, but Cianfrance’s approach to the material – despite his gently artsy visual approach, with handheld cameras and gritty, realistic suburban middle-class settings – is relatively mainstream in its tack, and results in a less fraught and complicated story than it probably should be.
But Roofman benefits from Tatum and Dunst’s ability to find and exploit the heart of the narrative. It’s a film that flirts with ideas of desperation and consumerism – it’s essentially about Jeffrey learning that his presence is more valuable than his presents, and thankfully the script stops just short of spelling that out in those exact terms, but spell it out it does anyway. It’s a classic case of two stars elevating the material. It’s also a neoclassical case of a story in which a guy whose face was all over the news for a week or three was essentially forgotten, unrecognized by the community despite his notoriety. The film is set in the mid-2000s, and one can’t help but assert that if it was set amidst the fractured attention spans of 2025, he’d only have to hide inside a Toys “R” Us for 20 minutes before we flit to the next headline and allow him to get away with his shit.
Our Call: Dunst and Tatum bring Roofman to life. STREAM IT.
How To Watch Roofman
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John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
