Film noir first developed in the '40s as a response to the bleak, morally depraved environment of postwar America, but even this decade's most clever variations on the genre—Red Rock West, Bound, The Usual Suspects, and The Underneath, among others—are so sealed off from reality that they really respond only to old film-noir movies. Best Laid Plans is a particularly empty exercise, offering no nourishment outside of twisty plot mechanics, but its shallowness doesn't make it any less entertaining. Working from a well-orchestrated script by Ted Griffin, British director Mike Barker paints the nowhere town of Tropico in vibrant and moody colors, keeping the action taut and allowing his appealing young cast to carry the story along. Since the twists come early and often, the less revealed about the premise, the better. Alessandro Nivola and Josh Brolin play old college buddies on diverging career paths—the former a working-class stiff manning a dead-end job at a recycling plant, the latter an aspiring English professor—who get together one evening for drinks. Brolin, the more superficially charming of two, leaves the bar with femme fatale Reese Witherspoon and takes her back to a luxurious mansion where he's house-sitting. Later, Nivola gets a frantic call from Brolin, who claims that Witherspoon turns out to be 16 and is accusing him of rape. All this happens within the first 10 minutes, and from there, Best Laid Plans quickly spirals into blackmail, robbery, and murder. Some references are made to the underclass desperation found in James M. Cain and Jim Thompson novels, but Griffin and Barker just use them to toy around with noir conventions. Their film is all shimmering surfaces, slight and forgettable, but for its short duration, it'd undeniably entertaining.