"The Outfit": one-paragraph review

Mark Rylance as Leonard Burling; Zoey Deutch (Lea Thompson's daughter!) as Mable Shaun

[WARNING: spoilers.]

By now, you know that, if I'm writing a one-paragraph review of a movie, it's probably because I didn't like the movie very much (although there are exceptions: I might like a movie, but its plot is so simplistic and superficial that there's little to discuss). I went back and forth a bit on "The Outfit," a 2022 mob drama directed by Graham Moore (his directorial debut) and starring Mark Rylance, Zoey Deutch, Johnny Flynn, Dylan O'Brien, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Simon Russell Beale. The movie is well acted and nicely shot, but the story has major problems. Filmed as if it were a stage play, the narrative has all the action taking place inside a mid-1950s Chicago tailor's shop run by an English "cutter," Leonard Burling, whose clients tend to be mafia types. The "Outfit" in question is a crime network that had been formed by Al Capone. Working with the older Leonard is his young assistant Mable Shaun (Deutch), and Mable is sleeping with Richie Boyle (O'Brien), scion of the Boyle crime family. Richie is, in turn, watched over by the Boyle-family enforcer Francis (Flynn). The Boyle family is up and coming, but it's in a turf war with the LaFontaine family. Francis and Richie come into the shop regularly to pick up mail from a special drop box in the back of the shop. Among the parcels are envelopes from the Outfit, which seems to be considering bringing the Boyle family into its fold. The Outfit has managed to obtain a copy of an FBI tape that reveals the Boyle family's inner workings, so the Boyles have to contend with a mole while they're dealing with the external threat of the LaFontaines. Much of the movie is about who's manipulating whom, who's betraying whom, and how it all turns out. I'll give a shout-out to the small, solid cast: Mark Rylance is great as the unassuming cutter with the checkered past; Zoey Deutch acts with a lot of subtlety as the starry-eyed Mable who dreams of traveling around Europe (her role here is in stark contrast with her role as a horny ditz in "Zombieland: Double Tap"); Dylan O'Brien is good as the vain, impulsive, and strangely decent Richie; Johnny Flynn is quietly menacing as Francis; when she finally appears at the very end, Nikki Amuka-Bird carries herself well as LaFontaine-family matriarch Violet (although her French accent needs work). My only casting gripe is with Simon Russell Beale as Roy Boyle, head of the Boyle family. Beale played Beria in "The Death of Stalin," and he was perfect for that comic role, but I don't think the man can carry a drama. Roy Boyle appears late in the story, but once he's there, he's supposed to command the screen, and Beale doesn't have the gravitas to pull this off. The story also features a lot of bad goombah accents that don't come off as particularly Irish-American (Beale, again, is among the worst offenders), and we get bad French accents from both Bird and Deutch (although, in Deutch's case, the character is supposed to speak in halting French, so I don't know how well Deutch herself actually speaks the language). Really, though, the main reason why I didn't end up liking this movie was that, even before I sat down to watch it, I knew that the meek, quiet tailor/cutter would prove to be the mastermind behind all events, and sure enough, he was. I further knew that the character would reveal he'd been a badass gangster himself in his younger days, and at the end of the film, Leonard Burling rolls up his sleeves to reveal the gang tattoos he's been hiding all these years. This was an unforgivably predictable movie, and with the actors giving excellent-but-stylized 1950s-ish performances, I could feel myself losing patience as the plot, already known to me, unfurled itself with agonizing slowness. This could have been a much better film had the script done a better job of playing things closer to the vest, but for me, this turned out to be an exasperating experience. For that, I blame the scriptwriters, not the actors. (Full disclosure: I seem to be in the minority with this film. Critics and regular viewers apparently loved it.)