LAROY, TEXAS - Mark Reviews Movies

LaRoy, Texas, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 11, 2024

For a town that looks all but abandoned along its main street, there's a lot going on in the eponymous setting of LaRoy, Texas. The winding and weaving plot of writer/director Shane Atkinson's debut feature includes hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, blackmail, mistaken identity, and a few violent deaths. Some of those are definitely murder, but the one that really sets the gears in motion might be self-defense, although the legal defense of a man pretending to be a professional assassin and shooting the guy he has agreed to murder in the head during a scuffle would take quite the attorney to argue in court.

Maybe it's a good thing, then, that Ray (John Magaro), the hapless and pathetic guy whose life is so miserable that he decides to play at being a hitman for just a bit of a thrill, doesn't have to worry about a trial here. He's too busy trying to cover up the mess he has gotten himself into, building up the courage to confront his cheating wife, hanging out with a desperately lonely and mostly incompetent private detective to determine why someone wanted the man he killed dead in the first place, and avoiding several people who are looking for that cash—some of whom are willing to kill over it.

The plot itself might make this sound like a straightforward neo-noir, especially since it opens with the actual career killer doing his work. We meet this man driving down a country road late at night, where he picks up a hitchhiker whose truck broke down a few miles back. The two men converse a bit, but in the middle of what he believes to qualify as small talk, the hitman starts posing hypothetical scenarios, such as wanting to give this specific man a ride, that he might have been the one cause the hitchhiker's truck to break down, and maybe the notion that his ride might have been hired to murder him.

Obviously, there's something eerie about this scene, made more so by the fact that the killer is played by that consummate character actor Dylan Baker, but it's also darkly amusing in the deadpan plainness of Atkinson's dialogue and the steady rhythm of how these revelations arrive. Baker adds some comedic bite to it, especially when he reveals a toothy smile that's somewhere between jovial downhome pleasantness and a wolf that has spotted some appetizing prey.

In addition to setting up the biggest threat that's always either a couple steps ahead of Ray or right on his tail, this opening scene mainly gives us a sense of the tone here, which exists in the same register as that smile, and the notion that the characters in this story are more than pawns. They give it color and flavor, so even as the mystery and chasing clues become convoluted, it's still fun to see how the characters involved in implementing and uncovering this elaborate scheme will react to a puzzle that becomes more befuddling as it's put together.

The main players are Ray, Baker's Harry, and that technically professional but practically amateur detective Skip (Steve Zahn), the kind of guy who spells his profession wrong on his business card and hasn't handed out nearly enough of them for anyone to notice. Skip, an old acquaintance of Ray's elder brother Junior (Matthew Del Negro), has Ray meet him to share some troubling news. While on a stakeout for another case, Skip gathered proof that Ray's wife Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson) is having an affair.

Instead of saying anything, though, Ray becomes determined to find his wife the money she needs to open a hair salon, despite her only experience of any note being that she won a local beauty pageant years ago. When that fails, Ray buys a pistol, is ready to shoot himself in front of the motel, and is stopped by a man who's supposed to meet Harry in the parking lot. The stranger hands him a bunch of cash, an address, and, in his mind, a reminder that the target needs to be killed the following day.

The rest of the plotting is a lot—too much to even hint at, let alone explain. Basically, Ray does kill the guy "in self-defense," and Skip figures out that fact. The two team up to unravel the conspiracy that led to Ray's involvement in such a mess.

How that mystery unfolds is less interesting than how these characters behave in the midst of it. There's Ray, who's essentially a push-over and resentful of himself for being so and more so of others seeing him that way. Magaro's performance is a tricky one, in that he equally has to be the comedically helpless foil to the plot and someone stewing in so much bitterness that he might start pushing back against the world.

Zahn plays the clown in his role as the private eye, but the underlying energy of a man anxious to be respected or just liked adds a layer of melancholy to the poor guy. Some of the other major characters point toward that desperation and loneliness, too, no matter how flawed, like Stacy-Lynn, or mean, like Junior, they might be.

There's another pair of scenes that summarize what LaRay, Texas is really about and how cleverly it is about that idea. They involve a car dealership owner (played by Adam Ledoux), who threatens the investigating pair, and his wife (played by Darcy Shean), who interrupts the standoff to offer these nice men coffee. The severe transforms into the comedic, but when the wife later explains why she puts up her husband's shenanigans, the harsh, pragmatic reality appears. These characters are all scrambling for something out of this life, and for most of them, it's much more important than money.

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