A Simple Plan (1998)
Directed by Sam Raimi
Captivated by the lure of sudden wealth, the quiet rural lives of two brothers erupt into conflicts of greed, paranoia and distrust when over $4 million in cash is discovered at the remote site of a downed small airplane. Their simple plan to retain the money while avoiding detection opens a Pandora's box when the fear of getting caught triggers panicked behavior and leads to virulent consequences.
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What critics compared A Simple Plan to
I get the feeling that Raimi sat in the theatre watching "Fargo" by his old cohorts and housemates, the Coen Brothers, and said to himself, "I could do that."
This movie is both funnier and more serious, and manages to make its points about bad behavior without debasing the humanity of its characters (cf Very Bad Things) or pointing at them and laughing (cf Fargo).
The desolate, wintry setting and random bursts of mayhem lend the movie a superficial resemblance to Fargo, but Raimi works without the Coen brothers' jokey plastic detachment.
Sam Raimi, creator of such frenetic cult films as The Evil Dead and Darkman, strapped himself into a strait-jacket to direct A Simple Plan, a deliberate thriller that has less in common with his genre faves than with friend Joel Coen's greed dirge Fargo, especially in its frosty milieu.
Set against a snowy backdrop that recalls the Coen Brothers' Fargo (indeed, Raimi, who has frequently collaborated with the Coens', asked his friends for advice about filming in such conditions), A Simple Plan is saturated with atmosphere.
Though the frozen tundra and forlorn characters initially echo Fargo, director Sam Raimi anchors his film in darkly realistic tragedy, not warped serio-comedy.
After Moss notices a briefcase containing two million dollars, he absconds with it in a gesture highly reminiscent of the characters in the 1998 “A Simple Plan,” a much more successful essay on the moral and physical hazards of appropriating ill-gotten gains.
As usual, original music by Carter Burwell ("A Simple Plan," "Miller's Crossing," "The Ladykillers"), who has scored the bulk of the Coens's oeuvre, is pitch perfect.
He tries to summon Hemingway rather than Faulkner, and the page-turning text reads like a movie treatment — say, A Simple Plan meets The Terminator .
One thinks of Hitchcock, or the sinful prospectors of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or the perfectly planned and inevitably botched heists of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing.
Check out Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing," or another picture where the money is cursed, and you've got the idea.
Every base is covered for a run at import: opening in the midst of a snowy Chicago winter, Road to Perdition even makes a play for the Oscar caveat of other films set in snowscapes, popular as a shorthand for credibility since the Coens' 1996 Fargo (and appearing since in films running the gamut from Ang Lee's brilliant The Ice Storm and Raimi's A Simple Plan to more uneven fare: Affliction , Snow Falling on Cedars, The Shipping News , and so on)--but shorthand is all it is, really (see also: the requisite shot of crossroads and liminal beaches).
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Played by Michael Douglas in a calculated reversal of his standard lethal-lothario persona, Grady is overweight and unshaven, with a bad haircut, glasses, and a stocking cap; he looks at times like the idiot brother played by Billy Bob Thornton in A Simple Plan.
Bay seems to have been gunning for something along the lines of "Blood Simple" or "A Simple Plan," but "Pain & Gain" is just plain simple.
Raimi knows how to modulate his technique, as with the coolly controlled morality tale “A Simple Plan,” but he’s a firm believer in the power of an active, expressive camera, as well as the value of insinuation.
Since then, Raimi has thrown a few curveballs -- from the "Fargo"-like "A Simple Plan" (Raimi is a longtime Coen Bros. cohort) to the hugely successful "Spider-Man" franchise.
When Sam Raimi jumped from low-budget action-horror-comedy (" Darkman ," " Army of Darkness ") toward first quiet respectability (with the great, underrated " A Simple Plan " and " For Love of the Game ") and then megabuck profitability (with the " Spider-Man " films), it was great to see a real American talent succeed.
This is how the very quirky, handmade style of films such as The Evil Dead, DARKMAN and even The Quick and the Dead suddenly gave way to the incredibly impersonal style of both A Simple Plan and the maudlin sports opera For Love of the Game.
The results were eclectic but effective, yielding the marvelous “A Simple Plan,” a taut thriller called “The Gift,” and the box office triumph of the first three “Spider Man” movies.
Since then he's directed a western ("The Quick and the Dead"), a crime drama (the brilliant, vastly underrated "A Simple Plan"), a baseball movie ("For the Love of the Game") and ... what else was there?
Raimi uses the chaotic fun of “Drag Me to Hell” and the bare-knuckled tension of “A Simple Plan” to make his own kind of deserted island movie…
Raimi’s best work remains 1998’s A Simple Plan…
…the adult drama Sam Raimi who occasionally pops out to deliver gems like A Simple Plan…
…it was directed by Sam Raimi — he’s known for this stuff. But aside his body horror resumé he’s also directed one of my favorite films of all time, “A Simple Plan,” which was even and controlled.
Raimi has done far better thing than this (see: "A Simple Plan," a full-blown masterpiece…
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A talented genre filmmaker who recently broke into new territory with A Simple Plan, he directs down to this movie, as if to say that if you’ve paid to watch this stuff, you must be a chump.