Is there "plot" in the film "Lookout"

I saw Scott Frank's "Lookout" a week ago, and I thought it absolutely reeked of stupidity. Seriously.

First off, who the f*** is Bone, the mysterious looking dude wearing glasses who never speaks?? We only learn his name after it's written down 10 minutes before the movie ends. Meanwhile, he is running abandoned houses and always chilling with the "bad guys." The entire intrigue of the bank was apparently masterminded by him. Yet nothing about him is revealed until the end, and for no good reason either! He's like the Ulysses of the Trojan horse plot, the big brain behind the ill-planned robbery, yet his fame dissipates by the fact that he neither speaks nor has a name.

The "must work backwards" motif doesn't work well either. It would have been much cooler if the entire plot was worked backwards, or something interesting. Not a stupid expression that the boy learns only to help him generate his plan against his former "allies." It has almost no significance, beyond the fact that it was mentioned once by Jeff Daniels, before it plays this pivotal role at the very end.

Finally, the entire presupposition of some amnesiac dude taken advantage of by a bunch of thugs also feels contrived. In "Memento," the entire plot is based around the idea of his amnesia - how did it happen? who caused it? how can i avenge it? here, however, it is taken as a subplot for some other unrelated plot. The term "unrelated" may be arguable, but seriously - why bend over backwards to make this "other plot" viable? It's almost like the creators ruminated on the most ridiculous way to render this plot plausible!

Introduction to Blog

We are students at Princeton, NJ who like to rant. Two of us are humanities majors, one an engineer, but regardless of our curricular orientations, we enjoy ranting (and raving, but mostly ranting). We hail from the West and East Coasts and are thus a diversified (white) group. Our political slants are liberal.

Enough of this introduction. We will rip up the Daily Prince, spit some Chaucer lines, and be generally erudite.

So, come, have a smoke in the boys' room. And kick it...