Notice to Quit

by Mike McGranaghan

Notice to Quit was shot on Kodak film. It looks gorgeous. New York City, where the story takes place, never looks better onscreen than when it’s been photographed with honest-to-goodness celluloid. The ambiance of the city’s neighborhoods just pops. Cinematographer Mika Altskan has done a fantastic job.

Why am I kicking off a review with the photography? Because it’s the one unequivocally great element in the film. Otherwise, writer/director Simon Hacker indulges in a series of tired cliches about a wisecracking loser who decides to get his life together after spending some time with the precocious child he was previously disinterested in. In this case, the loser is Andy Singer (Michael Zegen), a failed actor turned failed real estate broker. His 10-year-old daughter Anna (Kasey Bella Suarez) runs away from home because her mom is planning to move them to Florida.

For whatever reason, Hacker thought it would be interesting to have Andy in the desperate situation of needing to unload an apartment before the end of the day, lest he be evicted from his own place, which he has failed to pay rent on. This leads to a lot of scenes where the frenzied character tries to convince people to make a deal with him. Of course, Anna often insists on helping out, an act that begins to bond them. The encounters are all pretty much the same, with Andy stumbling and bumbling his way through each of them.

Notice to Quit tosses in two dumb subplots. In one, Anna becomes fascinated by an animal rights protest targeting the local zoo. It goes nowhere. The other has Andy getting threatened by a group of criminals he’s gotten entangled with. He leads them into vacant apartments, they steal the appliances. Because he’s a bad broker, he isn’t getting them prime stuff, so they jump him on the street and throw him into the back of a van. The whole thing is so contrived that it repeatedly stops the film dead in its tracks.

The actors, including Robert Klein as Andy’s dad, all give very sincere performances. A couple moments here and there elicit a chuckle, too. Where the picture falters is in the originality department. We’ve seen this general “kid helps an adult grow up” plot dozens and dozens of times over the years. For that reason, you know exactly where the story is going to take you within the first ten minutes. Every plot development is recycled from Paper Moon, Uncle Buck, and countless others.

Many of those movies did it much better. Notice to Quit goes through the motions, expecting that we’ll have our hearts melted once Andy finally realizes how much Anna means to him. Hacker’s screenplay is too pedestrian to earn any such emotion, though, rendering the whole thing bland as can be.

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