REVIEW. In ROOFMAN, crime does pay...but it'll cost you.
- MaryAnn Janosik
- Oct 14, 2025
- 6 min read
Beware the movie whose trailer plays like a rom-com, complete with Tom Petty's energized hit, "Running Down a Dream" (1989) echoing in the background. Quick cuts, witty comments, furtive glances, pratfalls and all, Roofman looked like a frantic, off-beat, thoroughly entertaining rom-com, starring the hunky (remember Magic Mike?) Channing Tatum and the always interesting Kirsten Dunst in the lead roles, with supporting turns from Lakeith Stanfield, Ben Mendelsohn, Juno Temple and Peter Dinklage. Co-written and directed by the always edgy Derek Cianfrance.
Not too shabby.
The tagline for Roofman reads, "Based on actual events... and bad decisions." Too bad the same could be said about the film's production: lots of real-life interactions between the crew and the people on which the movie is based, but plenty of questionable decisions about how the story is told. Though I doubted the frenetic pace of the trailer could be sustained for two hours, I didn't expect a labored, procedural portrait of how one man - Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum), a divorced veteran with three kids who, in 2004, robbed a string of McDonald's in order to give his family a better life - carefully and deliberately planned every move, each heist.
Manchester, currently serving out his sentence in a North Carolina prison, apparently has a very high IQ and a gift for attention to detail. When he discovered that the design for McD's restaurants included an easily penetrable roof, he targeted those restaurants as opportunities to supplement his low income. After observing the schedule for Brink's pick-ups, Manchester planned his thefts with meticulous precision, looting 43 restaurants before being apprehended and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Once incarcerated, Manchester begins to see opportunities to escape, but not in the usual way we often see criminals digging their way through underground tunnels. Instead, Manchester carefully watches the daily routines that involve trucks entering the prison yard to pick up items manufactured by the inmates. Day after day, he observes the routine, calculating how he can escape by stowing away in the truck's underbelly.
Once free, he cleverly hides in a Toys R Us store, again finding empty spaces and unused storage areas to build his own little apartment unnoticed by the employees. He finds ways to disengage security camera recordings and spies on the officious store manager Mitch (Peter Dinklage), listening to his conversations with staff and learning more about everything from how the payroll is done to upcoming special events.
While eavesdropping, Jeffrey is attracted to one of the store's employees, a divorced mother of two named Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), whom he discovers is collecting toys for needy children through her local church. Leigh was also asking Mitch to adjust her schedule so that she could tend to various activities with her daughters. Mitch turns down Leigh's request, so Jeffrey, hoping to help her, hacks into the system and alters her schedule so she can spend more time with family.
Eager to meet her - and to eat something healthier than the bags of M&M's peanuts he's been living on - Jeffrey then steals toys from the store and ventures out into community ostensibly offering a big bag of toys to the church drive, but really testing the waters to see if people could recognize him or are still talking about his escape from months earlier. Each time he goes out, he gains more confidence that his identity is safe, but the possibility of being found out lingers on.
Manchester never hurt anyone throughout his crime spree, even offering one frightened McDonald's manager his jacket at one point, before locking employees in the restaurant freezer. It is this quality of benevolence that is critical to Cianfrance and Tatum in building empathy for their leading man. In doing so, though, they tend to overlook/minimize Manchester's emotional and intellectual complexity, and so we're left to fill in the blanks related to his persistent motivation.
The film's opening prologue suggests that Manchester pursued a life of crime because his daughter was disappointed that he could not afford a bicycle for her sixth birthday, but that reductionist ploy doesn't quite hold up for the film's duration. By movie's end, we need to see more of what drives Manchester, what has brought him to that moral crossroads of thievery and, more importantly, what compels him to continue down that path.
Director and co-screenwriter Derek Cianfrance's select (re: sparse) filmography has typically included darker, more complicated stories, so Roofman is much lighter fare than some of his earlier films. Blue Valentine (2010) achingly chronicled the dissolution of a marriage by placing flashbacks of the couple's (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) courtship to underscore the ultimate heartbreak of their separation. The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), one of the most overlooked films of this century, explored relationships between fathers and sons, following the course of two teenaged boys into adulthood. The movie is, at times, Biblical in its presentation of the good and bad in men, then layered with touching personal circumstances that impact the ultimate, tragic adult confrontation between the two childhood friends (Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling).
In both Blue Valentine and A Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance effectively uses light and dark, shadows and sun to develop atmospheres that range from moodiness to joy, desperation to hopefulness. Both films rely on intricately developed characters whose relationships shape their fate and whose interactions reveal key personality traits.
In Roofman, the whole movie hinges on Channing Tatum - can he carry off the task of convincing the audience to care about a serial thief - a nice one, for the most part, but still a veteran who's been trained to kill, who probably suffers from PTSD, and who is carrying within him a significant amount of anger? The simple answer is "yes," as Tatum's engaging screen presence makes him easy to watch and even root for him.
I've seen Channing Tatum in movies on and off for almost two decades now and, though many associate him with the Magic Mike franchise (Tatum actually was a male stripper in his younger days, which served as the impetus for him helping create the very successful movie trilogy), I was most impressed with his role as Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Mark Schultz in 2014's sports-thriller Foxcatcher. Co-starring Steve Carell as millionaire and wrestling enthusiast John du Pont and Mark Ruffalo as Schultz's wrestling champion older brother Dave, Foxcatcher was another based-on-a-true-story film that really showcased how the three character's relationships underscored a deeper, more perverse connection to professional athletes and the fame they seek. The movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor (Carell) and Supporting Actor (Ruffalo). But Tatum clearly held his own, showing greater range and complexity of character than in some of his previous films.
Pairing him with the versatile Dunst here proves successful, as her character's directness and pragmatism provide the necessary balance for Tatum's lost veteran. Their courtship, sporadic and almost fleeting, nonetheless allows the two actors to find the kind of rhythm appropriate for forty-somethings looking more for stability, trust, and consistency than they are chasing youthful passion. You can feel alternating tentativeness and neediness from both actors and their chemistry, though not the stuff of standard Hollywood rom-com's or romances, is believable and sweet.
In the end, though, after spending most of the movie focusing on Manchester's razor sharp attention to intricate details and mundane routines, the plot kind of unravels with a lot of unanswered questions and loose ends. We can anticipate that Jeffrey's life on the fringe isn't sustainable, but the way in which Cianfrance resolves the story isn't particularly cohesive or satisfying. I'll not give any spoilers away, as this is a movie worth watching, even if you wait until it streams later this year.
But the lingering questions about Manchester's crimes in light of having limited finances don't always add up to the broader issue about whether Jeffrey is a good person. As the credits role, Cianfrance offers snippets of interviews with the real people who interacted with Manchester during his time on the run, including Leigh, the church pastor, a McDonald's employee, etc., and all offer testimony that Jeffrey Manchester, not up for parole until 2036, really is good human being who never harmed anyone.
I couldn't help but wonder, then, why Cianfrance spent so much of the movie showing us how Manchester carried off these various crimes and not more on why he continued, especially when raising ethical questions about doing the right thing. I kept imagining what this film would have looked like if Quentin Tarantino had directed it, perhaps giving it a quirkier, more audacious sense of humor depicting Manchester's life on the lam. Or maybe Monty Python's surreal absurdism might have served this story well: at least it might have provided us with a more appealing allegory for this bizare tale of crime gone goofy.
Do bad decisions sum up Jeffrey Manchester's life? Apparently not, but Cianfrance seems more intent producing a fairly slow, plodding semi-comedy that has more scenes showing Tatum threading a needle with dental floss than examining what was driving him to risk criminal exposure.
I stayed to the bitter end of the credits, waiting for "Running Down a Dream" to kick in somewhere, even the end credits, but nothing. No crumb of hope or enlightenment to nail Jeffrey Manchester's raison d'être, or even his raison de voler.
Too bad. I really needed to hear Tom Petty as I strolled out of the theater.
*******
Roofman is currently in theaters and rated R for language and nudity (mostly an extended sequence showing Tatum's backside). It is expected to arrive on various streaming platforms later this year.
Comments