“The film starts off with the premise of a corny knee-slapper: An assassin, a hooker, a dwarf, a pimp with an eye patch and Robert De Niro in a crazy wig walk into a motel … and muck around for 100 excruciating minutes.” —Warren Zhang

Hollywood movies aren’t all blockbusters and Oscar bait. There is a special breed of films that live on the fringe: those sent directly to DVD and those with such a limited release that they might as well have been.

Some of these movies are legitimately entertaining. Others include The Bag Man, a self-described “taut crime thriller” that is not even in the same universe as either of those concepts. For a movie about crime lords and shady guns for hire, The Bag Man stumbles into some pretty weird but frustratingly dreary places.  

The film starts off with the premise of a corny knee-slapper: An assassin (John Cusack, Adult World), a hooker, a dwarf, a pimp with an eye patch and Robert De Niro (American Hustle) in a crazy wig walk into a motel … and muck around for 100 excruciating minutes.

There’s some hoopla over a mysterious leather bag or something, but any actual plot is sidelined. The Bag Man is much more interested in indulging insipidly creepy fantasies that would put even Eli Roth to sleep.

Minus one gloriously idiotic car action scene, The Bag Man has no pulse. So inert it can’t even make the sight of a dwarf peeing on Cusack interesting, The Bag Man lacks the self-awareness to realize the trashy potential of its bargain-bin script. Even the torture and attempted sodomy scene is too boring to offend or upset.

All of the kooky, potentially engaging ideas get smothered in the same tedious drama-thriller veneer that drowns the rest of the film. This is an allegedly serious movie that features a pimp talking about raping Eve while making Adam watch, a prostitute dressed up as Wonder Woman and Crispin Glover (Hiszpanka) playing a mentally disabled motel attendant whose wheelchair belonged to his dead mother.

The degree to which The Bag Man lacks incident is almost comical. The loopy editing is content to waste minutes after minutes playing through circuitous dialogue. Half of the conversations in the movie are pointless: just Cusack and Glover or De Niro talking circles around one another in a pathetic attempt to be witty.

Past the 50-minute mark, once the film’s frustrating score becomes close to unbearable, The Bag Man becomes painful to watch. It turns into the film equivalent of purgatory, watching moderately to very successful actors slumming it in a movie so cut-rate that even the cheap motel set looks unconvincing.

There is no deliverance from The Bag Man and its special breed of direct-to-DVD inanity. You’re almost guaranteed to be in a coma by the movie’s end.