Nobel Son

writen by: Jody Savin & Randall Miller
directed by: Randall Miller

i can't remember what exactly it was that made me want to see Nobel Son. cause i know the commercial was on maaaaybe for a week and it was just a short clip of what seemed to be a shady heist movie starring Alan Rickman and Eliza Dushku so i figured what the hell.

the movie starts with an ATM mugging and a graphic clip of someone getting a thumb chopped off. Cut to Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman) in his super nerd biochemistry class when he find out that he has been selected for a nobel prize. His son Barkley (Bryan Greenberg) is a PhD candidate and is doing his thesis on...cannibalism...who is sitting in a coffee house when he hears the news. To say he is less than pleased is an understatement. The wife/mom Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) is an FBI profiler. At a dinner get together to celebrate Eli gets approached by one of many female students he has been sleeping with, she starts to cause a scene but he manages to shush her before people start to really notice. Barkley is ready to get out because he has the hots for this spoken word artist City Hall (Eliza Dushku). He watches her set at the coffee house (along with some other horrible hillarious artists) and they decide to go to her place for the night.

Barkley swears he's broke and she makes him stop at the ATM with a goofy mask on to prove just exactly how broke he is with an ATM slip. they go to her place and get it on on the roof. Eli and Sarah are at home anxiously awaiting his return but when they can't wait any longer, they ask the reformed passive agressive renter of their garage apartment (Danny Devito) to look out for Barkley. Barkley wakes up late and tries to rush to his parents house to catch the flight for the Nobel Prize ceremony but when he gets home, they are gone and BAM he gets got upside the back of the head. Thrown into the back of a MINI cooper, and taken to some abandonded shack where he then learns his kidnapper is Thaddeaus (Shawn Hatosy) and they have more in common than meets the eye.

From then the story gets more involved and Eli has to choose how important his son is to him and Sarah has to use her FBI skills to try and track her son. There's some double crossings, some family history, some horrible disguises, and a bad ass car scene in a mall.

This movie is one of the ones that you catch on cable in the middle of the night and get suckered into and can't stop watching. It's not a seamless story. There are plenty of plot holes and some unbelievable situations but the movie doesnt take itself that seriously so its great. Alan Rickman is always a great jerk. Mary Steenburgen is such a cute mom as usual. Shawn Hatosy was the bad guy in Alpha Dog that kidnaps the little boy and for some reason he is just a creepy kidnapper who gives me the willies.

Anyway, so look for the movie on Netflix or Redbox or wherever you go get rentals. Or wait for it to come on HBO late one night.