Talk about truth in advertising!
Caper
The film enjoyed its world premiere at SXSW 2025.
If the sight of anatomically-correct naked body suits makes you giggle out loud, rather than immediately put you off, then you're on the same wavelength as director Dean Imperial.
A rough and messy comedy that wears its influences proudly, Caper starts with a group of men gathering for a weekly poker game in New York City. (Shades of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.) Then they realize that Phil, one of their usual Gang of 6, is sitting in his car outside, in despair.
Then they learn that Phil has inadvertently sent an intimate selfie, intended for his girlfriend, to his boss, and is suicidal. (Again, shades of The Odd Couple.) They quickly determine that they must do whatever is necessary in order to keep Phil's boss from seeing that selfie, from stealing the phone and deleting the message, to somehow keeping the text from ever being delivered to the boss' phone.
One problem: they're all idiots.
They're lovable idiots, though, which makes the movie enjoyable. They may not be the brightest bulbs in the pack, but they have good intentions and they very much want to help their friend. They all have a network of friends, and they immediately tap into their respective networks to see who might be able to help.
It's at this point of the narrative that the movie draws upon another source of inspiration: Neil Simon's The Out of Towners, in which everything conceivably bad about visiting New York City in the crime-filled and turbulent late 1960s happens to poor Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis. Only instead of visitors, the Gang of 6 in Caper are all New Yorker residents, who suddenly see the very worst of their fellow residents brought to bear upon them, just as they're desperately trying to help a friend.
Part of their problem could be that they're all men who have had terrible relationships with the women in their lives. Selfie-taking Phil, for example, is married, so he's having an affair in which he plays out his sexual fantasies with the woman.
Chris (Christopher Tramantana), who was directing rehearsals for the opening stage play featuring naked body suits, is a former actor who doesn't even want to talk about his failed relationship, which has left him quite bitter. Duke (Asa James) calls upon an ex-girlfriend for help with retrieving the errant text message, only for it to be revealed that he was in a relationship with his ex-girlfriend while he was in another relationship with his 'primary' girlfriend.
For all the brash comedy concocted by writer and director Dean Imperial, a fair amount of toxic male behavior is also mixed into the brew, quite thoroughly. But it's behavior that the Group of 6 doesn't quite fathom as toxic, because of how they've been treating the women in their lives.
In other words, they think they are behaving honorably, even though they are definitely not honorable men. This all comes crashing home to them in the penultimate scene, which is brilliantly enacted and, in essence, deservedly smacks them in the face.
Comedy is not pretty, of course, and Caper is not always pretty. Yet it effectively delivers a smackdown when it's needed most, bolstering everything that went before.