Any Day Now

The great Paul Guilfoyle heads up Eric Aronson's indie crime drama, which imagines how the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner art theft might have gone down. Unfortunately, not having to stick to any facts about how the still-unsolved heist might have unfolded doesn't free Aronson up to be all that inventive. The movie features most of the basic Boston crime-picture tropes without anything fresh for us to latch onto, other than some scenes that look like they were indeed shot at the Gardner.

Taylor Gray stars as Steve Baker, an everyman night watchman in his early 20s whose life is going nowhere. He's in debt to his drug dealer, he plays in his rent-delinquent roommate's zero-prospects band, and he's in love with a girl who is way out of his league and only likes him as a friend. Steve is the kind of lame protagonist who requires an actor with a unique, charismatic quality to be compelling, and Gray isn't quiet up to the task. Guilfoyle plays Marty Lyons, a Boston cop and art thief who needs Steve's assistance to pull off the big score, and it's grand to watch such a legendary character actor play a lead role. Unfortunately, the movie and most of its individual scenes have little to no momentum, and we don't get invested in the heist or in Steve as a character. Though the film spans a few weeks, it's timed to last exactly as long as the real-life heist did, and this is one of the longest 81-minute movies I've seen in quite a while.