- Channing Tatum...Jeffrey Manchester
- Kirsten Dunst...Leigh Wainscott
- LaKeith Stanfield...Steve
- Juno Temple...Michelle
- Peter Dinklage...Mitch
- Ben Mendelsohn...Ron Smith
- Uzo Aduba...Eileen Smith
- Melonie Diaz...Talana
- Emory Cohen...Otis
- Molly Price...Sgt. Katherine Scheimreif
It’s a tale as old as time: robbing McDonald’s through the roof after they close. Except the employees are still there, and because he’s such a nice guy, he locks them in the fridge. Don’t worry—he calls the authorities afterward so they can get out. As if nothing could possibly go wrong in the time between him leaving and help showing up. It seems so easy and straightforward, it’s a wonder I haven’t done it yet.
ROOFMAN opens right in the middle of Jeffrey Manchester’s routine—dropping through ceilings and calmly cleaning out registers like he actually works at McDonald’s. He’s good at it, but eventually he gets caught. After robbing 45 different McDonald’s locations, Manchester is sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Prison doesn't agree with him. Almost immediately, he's scanning routines and weaknesses like he's back casing a McDonald’s. His escape is hiding in a false bottom he built in a box truck—low-tech in concept, but it actually takes some decent planning and work to pull off. This isn’t a movie about a criminal mastermind—it’s about persistence and not getting noticed.
Once he’s out, Manchester disappears into the world’s most bizarre safe house: a Toys “R” Us. He shuts off the cameras and moves into an inconspicuous corner of the store, surviving on a steady diet of Peanut M&M’s and whatever merchandise he can flip at the local pawn shop. It’s a middle-aged man living out a childhood fantasy as a survival strategy, like an alternate version of BIG where Tom Hanks never gets to go home. Here, Manchester isn’t liberated by the toy store — he’s imprisoned by the neon aisles and shiny new toys, spying on the employees with baby monitors.
Channing Tatum drops the usual MAGIC MIKE charm and plays Manchester with this low-key, vacant energy that actually works. He’s not going for swaggering outlaw or cool rebel—just a socially awkward guy who's oddly polite while making one bad decision after another. Even in that dumb blonde wig for the fake passport photo, he lets himself look a little pathetic, and it makes for a better movie.
Ginger-haired freak, Kirsten Dunst shows up and does what she’s been doing for the last decade—playing grounded wife/mom types with a quiet sadness humming underneath. It’s the kind of role she’s been playing since FARGO, and she’s still very good at it. Here, her weariness plays off Manchester’s blank detachment: she feels everything, he feels almost nothing, and somehow that makes their scenes land without forcing it.
The problem is that ROOFMAN eventually falls into the familiar “based on a true story” trap. Once Manchester meets Leigh, the trajectory becomes obvious. He grows attached to her kids. He lives a lie he can’t sustain. You know he’s going to disappoint everyone involved, and you know how it’s going to end long before the movie gets there. At over two hours, it lingers too long on Jeff’s isolation, stretching what could have been a tight 90-minute oddity.
Still, there’s an offbeat weirdness that kept me watching. Strange without feeling random, quiet without being dull. A movie about a grown man surviving on pawned toys and candy sounds like a stretch, but it’s more engaging than the premise suggests.
Final Verdict: 65 out of 100