Queenpins

A frustrated suburban housewife and her best friend hatch an illegal coupon-club scheme that scams millions of dollars from the corporations and delivers a litany of savings to legions of their fellow coupon clippers, but hot on their trail is an unlikely duo—a hapless wannabe of a loss-prevention officer and a determined U.S. postal inspector—both of whom are intent on ending the criminal enterprise.

Based loosely on the true story from 2012 of the largest counterfeit coupon scam perpetrated in U.S. history, where millions of unauthorized or forged coupons were sold for a mere fraction of their face value to an unknown number of consumers, who then used those coupons to get millions of dollars worth of free shit, resulting in three suburban women from Arizona being arrested, Queenpins is ultimately a film about the sadness, isolation, entitlement, and hollowness of the American dream.

Telling the story of average wannabes and never-weres, each consumed with their own particular version of that beautiful dream of keeping up with the Kardashians, Queenpins is a fantasy about one day striking it rich, of reaching out and actually being able to grab the brass ring, of the many gods of good fortune smiling down upon you as you hit the winning Lottery numbers, of finding that glorious loophole and diving straight through. At the same time, it’s a cautionary tale in the same vein as those classic stories of Lover’s Lane and the Hook-hand Killer, but instead of having a message of “Don’t go fucking in that backseat, kids, or else…” its message is: “Follow the rules, kids, or else.” It’s a modern day retelling of the story of Icarus for a modern day American audience, laugh at the folly as you bear witness to a tale of people who stupidly dared to be clever enough to make some wings and escape, because all that meant was that they flew too high, and as a result, fell so very, very far…

Connie lives an unremarkable little mediocre life of quiet dissatisfaction, one that, as a former gold-medal-winning Olympic athlete (in race-walking), is much smaller and sadder than she expected. For most of her life, she not only believed that she had done everything right, everything she was supposed to, but that she had done it far better than most people. And yet, after multiple expensive fertility treatments that didn’t work, she and her IRS auditor husband are now estranged, deeply in debt, and living in the most uninspiring suburban hell imaginable. Her only real happiness comes in that moment when she sees the amount of savings she gets with her coupons at the grocery store, that “coupon high” is all that lights her fire these days.

Connie’s best friend and next door neighbor, JoJo, is a wannabe entrepreneur, and a one-time victim of identity theft that ruined her credit and her future, forcing her to have to move in with her mother. She has no job prospects now, and no matter how hard she tries, no matter how good she is, it doesn’t matter, someone screwed her over one time, and she must pay for that forever. For the crime of being a victim, she has been sentenced to a lifetime of poverty and zero opportunity, with no options when it comes to fixing the situation, and no one who is even willing to listen. Now, because she was wronged, robbed of her identity by a stranger, and abandoned by our uncaring capitalist and pro-corporation system, all she has laid out before her for the rest of her life is a series of soul-sucking dead-end jobs that couldn’t care less about her, or the fact she can’t possibly live on the pittance they pay, as long as she does the labor, and doesn’t rock the boat. And everyone tells her that it’s all her fault.

But… after an angry complaint letter about some stale cereal results in them receiving a coupon for a free box, the duo trip down a path that leads to them discovering that all of the coupons are printed just across the border in Mexico, after the printing plant was moved there by the corporation to save money. The pair decide to take a roadtrip, and once there, convince an expecting husband and wife pair of underpaid employees to ship them all of the extra coupons from the printing runs.

Connie and JoJo then set up a cheap website, and soon their referral-only club is making them a ton of money as they sell these coupons for pennies on the dollar. A ton of money. This leads to them moving more and more coupons, which only gets them more and more money, more money than they know what to do with, or how to hide. So, to clean their money, Connie and Jojo start buying things, things they can then sell in order to clean the money, things like Lambos and guns, and anything else they can think of. They are hustling. They’re rolling in dough. They fly private jets. They eat fancy and stay fancier. They Vay-Cay All The Way, Bae!

It’s a beautiful new life they’ve made for themselves, and the only people who are getting hurt are the people in the boardrooms who deserve much worse.

And… because the scam involves coupons, despite the corporations howling about the amount of fraud now pouring in, no one in Law Enforcement gives a shit. At least, not until a wanna-be loser Grocery Store Loss Prevention Officer, drunk on his meager power, is able to convince a USPS Investigator—an exhausted, generally irritated, and very dedicated advocate of the unacknowledged importance of the Postal Service—to aid him in tracking down our titular Queenpins of Coupon Crime.

This makes sense. It was going to happen sooner or later.

Because no matter what? What Connie and Jojo are doing is stepping out of line, and the Man can’t have that shit. No, sir. Nuh-uh. No way. Not only can The Man not have it, but certain types of men can’t have it either, especially when they’re low-rent Postal Inspectors and jumped-up Grocery Store Security Guards, especially when they’re tiny little men nobody respects, each in their own way being eaten alive by a hunger to be powerful, to be respected, to be feared.

Also, one of them shits his pants during a stakeout.

Eventually, these are the guys who finally manage to convince The Man to take this coupon shit, this “pink collar crime” seriously. And now, they can’t wait to put on all their black tactical gear and come roaring up on these ladies’ lawns in their surplus military armored vehicles. Lock and load, boys! Woo-hoo! Rock ‘n Roll!

I know I’m making it sound otherwise, and it’s probably obvious from the poster, but just fyi… Queenpins is a comedy, and it’s a pretty basic one too. It’s fine. Moderately funny, decently written, generally unremarkable, but with a really great cast, it’s all-around pretty fun, but it’s a small fun, lower case fun. In the end, it’s really nothing special, nothing more than an amusing waste of an evening, it’s not re-inventing the wheel or anything. It’s just a good choice if you want to watch something light while having dinner in front of the TV.

But also…

I’m always a little wary of these types of films, the ones about some down-on-their-luck fucker, someone who has been fucked over by our shitty capitalist society, and as a result, decides to take a shot at making their life better… only to fail.

Much like the recent spate of neo-noir heist films we’ve been getting, the ones that are about a group of vets, newly returned home from one of America’s many brushfire wars across the globe, who discover that the society they killed for isn’t interested in providing them with any opportunities to build a new life, so they’re forced to gamble on changing their futures themselves, but in the end, all they get is gunned down in the street, I have to ask… What the fuck is that shit? Who wants to see that bullshit story? Why wouldn’t you want them to get away with it? The only reason I can think of, is that these stories are ultimately meant as a warning, a reminder to the hoi polloi that while dreams are fun, they should never, ever forget their place, and these stories are a reminder of what might happen should you forget that...

That having been said…

If you ask me, the only truly good versions of these kinds of films, these “Go on, take the money and run” types of films, the only ones that could honestly be considered to be truly worth your time, are the ones where the criminals get away with it, because there is no world where the cops and the corporations are the good guys, and anyone who tells you differently is a bootlicking narc.

So, with that in mind… while, yes, it’s a pretty average film overall, I still kinda loved Queenpins.