Born under a bad sign
Been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck
You know, I wouldn’t have no luck at all …– “Born Under a Bad Sign” by Albert King
Fatalism tells us that everything is predestined and nothing is within our control. Our choices, our decisions, any sense of freedom at all, is nothing more than façade. In the same way that luck is really opportunity + preparation, offering an optimistic perspective, a sense of dominion over our lives because it means that luck is of our own creation, fatalism implies the exact opposite, where it matters not what you try, what you attempt, or what you prepare, you hold no authority over anything that you do, down to the consequences. This courses through the crime thriller Crooks, the latest project from writer/director Mickey Keating (Invader) which seeks to douse its audience in genre thrills, chills, and blood spills, and is having its world premiere in the Viewpoints section of Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
Things seem pretty bad for Faye (Angela Trimbur), recently fired as a lounge singer, and don’t get much better when her ex-partner, Johnny (Chase Williamson), walks in and offers her a part on a brand-new score. The research is done and the rewards could change both their lives, but what neither could anticipate was the bloody trail that would be forged because of this one decision.
L-R: Angela Trimbur as Faye and Chase Williamson as Johnny in CROOKS. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival/Missing Link Productions.
Written and directed by Keating, Crooks wears its influences on its sleeve. Modern audiences are most likely to notice the immediate Quentin Tarantino aspects between Faye’s hair style which evokes both Mia Wallace and Fabienne in Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as one specific bit of dialogue ripped straight from Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Of course, like Keating, Tarantino was, himself, inspired by the pulp tales of the 1940s and 1950s, stories in which hard characters sought to change their fate, regardless of who they had to take down to make it happen. As if to capture this sense, production designer Breanne Ward ($POSITIONS) and costume designer Sarah Albrecht (Christmas Is Canceled) crafted a vision of a timeless Chicago in which style is first and foremost in conveying who Faye is, from her sequin dress as a singer in a club to her tan suit with black lines as a professional thief, each one a costume that Faye wears in the sense that they denote a version of who she wants to be or, perhaps, who she needs to be in the moment. Trimbur (Quiz Lady) portrays Faye as someone with few options who sees a return to crime as a way to avoid a permanent pitfall, giving the character gravitas even amid the violence. Akin to the hard-boiled femme fatales of The Big Heat’s (1953) Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), Faye does what she has to do to survive, the outfits being a skin she must adorn and shed as necessary. At no point do we get a solid sense of what it is that Faye wants, which isn’t a critique on Trimbur’s performance, as the script keeps things quite simplified: money is the aim, but it represents something larger — freedom. That’s all Keating offers to his characters and, like rats in a maze, all roads lead to the same dead end.
This is where the film gets messy both literally and metaphorically. Keating has set up his characters like a congregation of Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty; Out of Sight; Rum Punch; Fire in the Hole) figures without an honorable one among them. As a result, the film is less deep than one may desire, infusing Crooks with a sensation of style over substance. With the exceptions of Faye and Johnny, motivations are pretty clear, though character development is minimal. This makes it easy for Keating to tell a story in under 90 minutes completely, with several surprises and turns which will keep audiences as off-balance as the characters within the tale, but doing so also sacrifices a necessary depth for audiences to feel something beyond the rush of the ride upon the story’s conclusion. I’m not suggesting that we need a deep backstory on Keith Kupferer’s (BRB; Ghostlight) The Ghost, a hitter hired to track down the thieves, because what Keating provides alongside Kupferer’s intimidating performance tells us everything we need to know about the relentless and skilled hired gun. Heck, Melora Walters (Boogie Nights; Ed Wood) as waitress Blanche steals the film right from under Trimbur, offering a performance that’s quaint and delicate in one moment and quite chilling the next, Walters’s physicality and kinesthetic choices giving way to a formidable figure despite the presentation of a more delicate individual. When executed well, we get enough information to formulate who these people are. Thus, I’m not suggesting that answers need to be provided for everything. Life doesn’t guarantee answers, it doesn’t care about expectations; sometimes things are profoundly unsatisfying and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. In a fatalistic tale like Crooks wherein we’re along for the ride regardless of who drives and where they go, clinging to any notion of clarity is only going to create another victim to the narrative. Rather, while a pulp story of thieves, shooters, and killers trying to play hot potato with foul earnings works fine as a dime store thrill, in a film, we need a bit more to go on in order to truly invest.
L-R: Angela Trimbur as Faye and Trevor Dawkins as Cyclops in CROOKS. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival/Missing Link Productions.
Crooks is as it says on the tin — crooked. Hard men, harder women, and not an ounce of good fortune exist within this tale of desperation. Those who recognize the reference points or are familiar with the works of Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity), or John Huston (The Maltese Falcon) will certainly welcome the opportunity to visit, mostly because all the bad luck should stay right within the frames. Even still, the skill that Keating displays of understanding the genre, through references and homages, isn’t enough to grip audiences once the thrill ride is over. Absent true investment in the characters and lacking a weighted bleakness to cause lingering, Crooks offers a good time for a short time – but a short time is all any of us have, anyway.
Screened during Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
For more information, head to the official Tribeca Film Festival Crooks webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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