An engaging enough dramatization of the true story of a man who became known for spending months hiding out in a Toys “R” Us to escape capture after robbing businesses by coming in through their roofs, Derek Cianfrance’s “Roofman” is also a regrettably safe film defined by missed opportunities that ultimately steals any deeper resonances it could find right out from under you.
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It’s a film that feints towards taking on more thorny, complicated questions about its character and the world he is living in, though it never follows through on fully engaging with them. It’s sufficiently thoughtful in the broad strokes, but if you attempt to look closer or think deeper about everything that’s unfolding, you’ll find there’s very little actually there. What’s left is a more troubling eventual reinforcement of a status quo built on carceral punishment to solve pressing societal problems that the film seems uninterested in even grappling with. 
It’s also a frequently fun movie that you get largely swept up in, brief moments, even as the frustrations in how timid it is eventually drag it all down. In many respects, one of the film’s greatest assets, star Channing Tatum, may also be its most fatal flaw. As Jeffrey Manchester, a former United States Army Reserve officer, who we hear in the opening narrating through how it was that he got here, Tatum is charming to a fault and just flawed enough to make you feel like you’re getting to know a deeper side to him. However, looks can be deceiving.
As he goes from robbing a McDonald’s in an early scene that sees him giving his jacket to the manager before he leaves them locked in the freezer to spending a stint in jail, then escaping out into the world where he must hide out, Tatum’s performance always feels built to be more superficially silly and sincere. Unfortunately, the former usually undoes the latter, with “Roofman” offering little more to the man himself or explaining why he found himself on the roof in the first place. 
The generally light tone Tatum and Cianfrance lean heavily on masks, which is a fundamentally broken situation. Though it has a precise amount of compassion for Manchester, the “Roofman” frequently misses the forest for the trees by only lightly pondering why it is that someone would be driven to such a point of desperation that they would risk destroying their own life and losing their family by committing these crimes. Perhaps, and hear me out, there is something inescapably wrong with our world when this seems like a good option for someone to take? Before you can ever sit with this more heavy state of affairs for even a second, “Roofman” is speeding along to the subsequent development or shenanigans that Manchester is getting up to.

As he makes his inventive escape from prison and then sets up a home in the Toys “R” Us, increasingly having fun playing around in the building while subsisting primarily on whatever food he can scrounge up, it’s occasionally entertaining to watch, though ultimately empty. While people were drawn to the story precisely because of how funny it sounds on paper, the reality underneath it goes underexplored to such a point that you feel like we’re being gently, though still consistently, deceived. Like the new family that Manchester becomes a part of when he eventually ventures out into the world outside, an element of the film that essentially wastes both the talents of Kirsten Dunst and “Good One” breakout Lily Collias, the film also seems intent on keeping us in the dark. 
It’s a shame, as Cianfrance has previously made great, shattering films like “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” is an astute filmmaker. Much of how he directs many of the individual scenes here proves engrossing, and it’s consistently well-shot. It’s just a hard pill to swallow when the film concludes with Tatum monologuing about how Manchester needs to be in prison, and that’s where he belongs. Yes, the man did rob many businesses, with one concluding final robbery taking a more violent turn. However, it’s hard to shake the sense that the film is letting itself and us off the hook from having to look more closely at the broken system it is swimming in.
There is some closing text that complicates whether we are meant to take this fully seriously, but the film maintains a queasy investment in this being the way order is restored. All you end up feeling, both of how Manchester was sentenced to decades in prison and of the film now about him, is what a tragic waste it all is. [C]
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