There’s something about the brutal efficiency that went into configuring “I Got Bombed at Harvey’s” for a modern audience that creates a bit of a fascinating tension with what directors
Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel have shown their interests to be, following up their wildly entertaining 2022 film “The Pez Outlaw,” about a sophisticated smuggling operation of the candy dispensers from Europe to the U.S. run by an ornery Midwesterner with an equally curious criminal tale about a seemingly unwarranted attack on a Lake Tahoe casino in 1980. The film stops just short in its opening minutes of revealing whether or not the family-run Harvey’s Casino was leveled as authorities weighed paying a $3 million ransom, but the filmmakers waste no time giving the sense that an explosion has happened when overwhelming audiences with a bevy of information, playing out less like the introductory trailer that a lot of nonfiction films deploy nowadays to insist on your time won’t be wasted rather than honoring the film’s plot, yet still putting the most dramatic moment upfront that most others would take time to build to. Upending the conventional order of events may grab attention, but it also ends up wreaking havoc on the story to follow, a worthwhile potboiler that it takes time to warm up to.
Perhaps the chaotic opening is true to what law enforcement experienced when they first got the call that a bomb had been delivered to the casino inside a Xerox machine container with a ransom note, not knowing at all where it could come from when Harvey Gross, the proprietor seemingly had no enemies. Yet the prolonged search for a suspect means that it takes a bit to reveal the heart of the film in a variety of ways when it delays the introduction of Jim Birges, whose father known as Big John Birges masterminded the plot against Harvey’s. Big John’s scheme to relieve himself of gambling debts may be related as an “Ocean’s 11”-esque caper, but the real intrigue lies with Jim, who describes a family portrait where he politely stands next to his brother John Jr. and his dad as “propaganda” and recounts how he raised his sons to be pitbulls, at odds with one another. Creating the competition would help Big John lure them into helping him shakedown the casino for reasons that were personal to them, yet each out of a misguided belief they’d be appeasing their dad and when both would have to contend with the fallout for their father’s sins, bearing some responsibility for participating but certainly wouldn’t have done so on their own, the consequences appear to be far more punitive for them than whatever fate awaits Big John.
When a more abstract notion of injustice becomes the most compelling element of “I Got Bombed at Harvey’s,” it’s can become slightly jarring after the film’s initial razzle dazzle to keep up a zippy tone as it enters more somber territory and after revealing what could be the film’s climax and the culprit almost immediately, the unnatural structure set off by the opening seems to create more issues than it solves. However, the Storkels’ strengths are on full display when once again they take an amateur criminal’s exploits seriously in a way few at the time did, channeling the exhilaration that both of the Birges brothers were overtaken by as they helped their father and give credence to the idea that Big John’s revenge plot that took considerable ingenuity and confounded authorities is worthy of a big-screen treatment, with the filmmakers shrewdly using recreations not to illustrate major events – they can lean on real news reports for that — but fill in the gaps that make the overall effort feel cinematic. Their decision to use AI to recreate John Jr.’s voice for a handful of scenes from the memoir he wrote is going to feel like a step too far to some, but at least it’s acknowledged and like everything else in the film is intended not to let anything get in the way of a good story. Ultimately, “I Got Bombed at Harvey’s” is undeniable on that front, engaging throughout yet strangely satisfying less for chronicling a wild goose chase for federal law enforcement that can come to a tidy conclusion than the far less easily resolved search for acceptance that’s relatable even without a criminal for a patriarch.
“I Got Bombed at Harvey’s” does not yet have U.S. distribution.