There are certainly strategies worse than going all-in on New York City neighborhood flavor to sustain a crowd-pleaser. It isn’t just the power of location shooting, but also the access to a vast array of untapped, scruffy actors living in the area. Put a bunch of them in a van with a pizza and that could be solid enough foundation for a film. It could even be called something simple — like “Caper.” Does it really need to be more complicated than that?
Perhaps not always, but definitely here. Writer-director Dean Imperial loses on such a gamble with his tedious feature debut, which tracks an unhinged night of escapades between a bunch of poker buddies. Some of them are pushing middle age, several are even a few years past it, but they’re all about to turn juvenile. One of their compadres (Ron Palais) is spiraling toward suicide after erroneously sending a pornographic selfie to his boss; the race is on to hack or snag the receiving smartphone before daybreak.
That’s a straightforward, even sympathetic premise with a crass edge to boot. Imperial has trouble taking it anywhere from there. Bounding from one borough to another, “Caper” plays out like an odyssey of fast failures, as the men attempt to recruit help and are wallopped with individual embarrassments. Two spurned lovers with tech connections make appearances. One is played for laughs, the other for pathos. Both prove facile stabs at deepening their male counterparts.
Those intimate pauses are more endurable than the film’s particularly unfunny comic centerpiece, in which the men venture into a nightclub to meet with a generic, coke-addled magnate. To enter the premises, the group members are forced to rent skimpy themed costumes — a setup that’s comic on its face, then left without a punchline. It is one thing to see unhip men don assless chaps, but their subtle humiliation, the mood of the club, even a full gawk at the costumes themselves are all brushed by.
It’s a dead end that sums up “Caper”’s large inability to tell a good joke. Imperial has arranged a familiar but still diverse buffet of frantic situations, but he lacks a feel for how to make his antiheroes reveal their true selves under such circumstances. It’s an adventure film without a sense of discovery and few characters grow beyond a first impression.
The missed opportunities seem all the more profound because the stars have an evident rapport and seem fairly game to debase themselves. (Several of the actors have producing credits, and others share a performance history at a local improv company.) There are scattered highlights that come when the performances are at their loosest, as when one buddy (Richard Cooper) fails to bribe a trickster doorman or when another (Celester Rich) gets to play womanizer to distract a female security guard.
But most scenes exhaust all comic avenues within a few seconds. Where “Caper” becomes truly dismaying though is when it frames such wallowing as satire. For some reason or another, the film seems obligated to position itself above the masculine tribalism it’s high on. Some dialogue signifiers — the men fearing the wrath of a “progressive feminist boss” or a woman scolding them to “get a therapist” — seem simplistic and downright useless in the context of what’s branded as a lowbrow romp sprung from the gutter. For all its unkempt facial hair and chilly nighttime photography, “Caper” is much more ingratiating than it is gritty. The characters’ desperations seem all the more simulated next to the film’s own overwhelming self-consciousness.
