The Outfit

Leonard is an English tailor who used to make suits on London's famous Savile Row, but now he owns a shop in Chicago, and his primary customers are a local family of gangsters. One winter night, things go bad, and in order to survive, he must outsmart a dangerous group of criminals.

With its single setting of a few rooms in a Bespoke Cutter & Tailor’s shop, where the actors enter and exit with well-timed regularity, pausing, posing, and delivering their clearly enunciated 1950s Chicago Mob/Noir Talk in measured bursts, you would be forgiven for assuming that The Outfit is based on a stage play.

But it’s not, which makes its broad archetypes and somewhat obvious contrivances a lot less forgivable…

The Outfit is a clean and very chatty little gangster story, albeit a somewhat overly self-amused example of the genre, not to mention a needlessly labyrinthine one, to the point of silliness, with its continual double-crosses and constant au contraires. Still, the cast is great, and it does look really good. It’s not overly long either, so there’s that. Overall, the film is very nice. It’s very pleasant.

But that’s the long and the short of it.

It’s nice. Very pleasant.

I can’t really say that I found any glaring faults with The Outfit, not really, save for the general unremarkableness of it all, and the unmemorable workmanlike level of quality throughout. It’s too bad the rest of the film didn’t match the strength of the opening. Maybe this wouldn’t have been the case, if the film hadn’t been so focused on trotting out its next “grand reveal” the whole time.

But, here we are…