With the Ocean’s Eleven franchise long folded, Scott Caan isn’t getting the calls from Hollywood he used to (and deserves), so he’s doing something about it. In One Day as a Lion, he’s written himself a meaty part as a man so desperate to save his teenaged child from a life behind bars, he’s willing to murder a stranger. Caan’s taken the word-processor route thrice before; the difference here is he’s ceded the director’s chair to someone else: John Swab, the on-the-rise filmmaker behind 2022’s impressive sex-worker thriller Candy Land (which gets a visual and an aural Easter egg).
Caan’s cash-strapped Jackie Powers has three days to hire a lawyer for his wrongly arrested son’s juvenile detention hearing. Luckily (?), a local “degenerate cowboy” (J.K. Simmons, Spider-Man) has gambled himself into $100,000 debt to an Oklahoma crime lord (Frank Grillo, The Purge: Anarchy), so Jackie reluctantly agrees to commit the hit. He fails, spectacularly, accidentally killing a bystander in the process. This sends Jackie with nowhere to go but on the run, kidnapping the lone witness, Lola (Marianne Rendón, Charlie Says).
Did I mention this is largely played for laughs? And would you believe it largely works? (Unmemorable and potentially problematic title notwithstanding.)
Looking more and more like his father by the day, Caan is gracious and likable, despite shooting that innocent man to death in the opening scene. (It helps you never see the victim once he takes the bullet — outta sight, outta mind, right?) However skewed Jackie’s moral code may be, he at least tries to do the right thing, thereby earning the audiences’ goodwill. At his side, not always willingly, Rendón’s dry, droll waitress gets the Lion’s share of the best lines. Where the pair ends up isn’t warranted, in part because the ending is so abrupt and anti-climactic, it feels like a penultimate scene that somehow got freeze-framed. Cue credits!
With a mix of actors known and not, the cast is solid. Brief bits by Virginia Madsen and Taryn Manning as, respectively, Lola’s mom and Jackie’s ex-wife, enliven an already fun film. It almost goes without saying Simmons is never not terrific. Shot in Swab’s Sooner State hometown of Tulsa and surrounding small towns, A Lion for a Day aptly uses its setting to serve the story, and the orange-and-yellow saturation of scenes help viewers feel Oklahoma’s oppressive summer heat.
Those triple-digit degrees are brutal, trust me. They’re to blame for Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King TV series retreating to L.A. for season 2. Come to think of it, A Lion for a Day’s tale of cowboys and criminals shares so much DNA, it could be a backdoor pilot for a secondary Tulsa King character’s spin-off. That’s not a knock; it’s a recommendation. —Rod Lott