Plot
A man meets up with two "good guys" to recover what is unlawfully his, taking them on his whirlwind ride, doing things they never would have imagined, just to survive.

Release Year: 2010

Rating: 6.0/10 (4,040 voted)

Director: Stephen Milburn Anderson

Stars: Sean Bean, Chris Hemsworth, Victoria Profeta

Storyline
A stroke of good luck turns lethal for Sam Phelan and his wife Leslie when they are faced with a life-changing decision that brings strange and sinister Pyke Kubic to their doorstep. As Pyke leads Sam and Leslie on a tumultuous adventure through the streets of Chicago, each are pulled deeper and deeper into a desperate spiral of deception and violence... All in the name of money.

Cast:
Sean Bean - Pyke Kubic / Reese Kubic
Chris Hemsworth - Sam Phelan
Victoria Profeta - Leslie Phelan
Mike Starr - Melvin Goldberg
Michael Mantell - Mr. Dale
Glenn Plummer - Glenn the Plumber
Antony Thekkek - Bahadurjit Tejeenderpeet Singh
Paul Sanchez - Cole
Peggy Roeder - Mom
Larry Neumann Jr. - Mr. Polski Motel Manager
Mindy Bell - Sales Clerk
Christian Stolte - Car Sales Manager
Robert C. Goodwin - Bartender (as Robert Goodwin)
Bruce Potts - Zeke
Jacqueline Williams - Plumber's Wife

Taglines: Love for money is the...

Official Website: Official site |

Release Date: 3 Jan 2010

Filming Locations: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Box Office Details

Budget: $7,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: $16,469 (USA) (28 March 2010) (27 Screens)

Gross: $46,451 (USA) (18 April 2010)

Runtime: 108 min

Goofs:
Revealing mistakes: When they are struggling in the car over the gun, Pike calls Sam, Chris (his real name).

Ca$h Breaks Hollywood Rules

Rating: 9/10

In this day of cookie-cutter thrillers and Hollywood formula flicks, writer/director Stephen Milburn Anderson and producer Naveen Chathappuram bring us a film that shatters genre rules. It's a story about the power of money and how it manipulates human behavior. In a movie manufactured by Hollywood group-think, this film would have been about two innocent victims (Sam and Leslie) who struggle to make their mortgage payments and one day, during a police chase, a briefcase bursting with cash lands on their old car, they decide to keep the money and the bad guy comes looking for it. It would be the naive couple's story.

But Ca$h isn't that simple. The story starts with Pyke Kubic (Sean Bean), a Brit flying into Chicago to help out his twin brother, Reese (Sean Bean), whose cash-laden briefcase collided with law-abiding Sam's car. So Ca$h is a brother loyalty story. Besides, the brothers make a business deal: Pyke will recover Reese's cash and they'll split it 50/50.

The line blurs between the traditional antagonist and protagonist, especially as the story progresses. Pyke's unexpected accommodating manner and willingness to help Sam and Leslie collect the cash they stowed and recover the rest they spent, paint him as a likable character, not an evil antagonist. But Pyke has powers of persuasion, both intellectual and physical, and Pyke won't stop until he gets what he wants. So he moves in with Sam and Leslie until every last penny of the cash is back in the briefcase.

Pyke is a savant with numbers. When he learns from Leslie the exact tally of cash that was in the briefcase, he keeps a running tab in his mind of missing cash until every cent is replaced. There is a dark gleefulness in many of the scenes. Pyke escorts the couple to Leslie's mum's house, where they've left a large sum of the cash for safekeeping. They discover that Mum has "borrowed" $600 and Pyke says, "When it comes to cash, nobody can be trusted." When Pyke takes the couple to the banker who was foreclosing on their mortgage until Sam showed up with $7,000 in cash (from the briefcase of destiny), Pyke negotiates a brilliant deal with the bank to loan the couple $11,000.

Sean Bean's (Lord of the Rings, Flight Plan, Patriot Games, National Treasure) performance as Pyke is natural and intense. He draws the audience in with his character's centered calmness, unrelenting focus on his goal and precarious balance of civility and violence. Bean plays his character's genius for numbers and deal-making juxtaposed with his descent into thug-driven brutality, when absolutely necessary, with fluid complexity.

Chris Hemsworth (Star Trek, A Perfect Getaway) as Sam gives us a sympathetic, yet humanly flawed character who struggles briefly with the morally right thing to do. It's easy to accept Hemsworth as Sam. He looks like a nice guy; he acts like a nice guy until Pyke shoves Sam into the black hole of criminality. Hemsworth makes the tricky transition from respectable citizen to ruthless armed robber in a convincing arc of desperate acts.

Ca$h isn't a thriller in academic film terms. It's not a traditional action film, either. If the film must have a label, it is neo noir satire. Noir features a desperate protagonist who is an anti-hero. That certainly fits Sean Bean's Pyke/Reese characters. As the story progresses, it also fits Sam and Leslie as they begin to enjoy the power a gun brings to a moment of confrontation, when they're on the trigger end of the 9mm.

Writer/director Stephen Milburn Anderson wrote this script in the Nineties and sat on it until he could make the movie his way. Not giving in to the hellish Hollywood development machine, Anderson and his producers bring us a "genre" film gone rogue.

Just because Hollywood doesn't have the right-size box or label for Ca$h doesn't mean it's not a package worth opening. It's a surprising present of cinema delight and if you are fatigued with Hollywood drivel, Ca$h has your name on it.

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