The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This film opens with a quote from Mark Twain, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." If the author of this script followed this advice and did not make a formulaic bandit adventurer plot for this feature, this would have been a much better film. Instead, the script writer attempted to write an alternative modern-day retelling of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by rebirthing Tom as a police officer and Huck as a convict just leaving prison. Huck and a couple of other friends are roped into a robbery by Tom, but the whole thing goes horrifically wrong in what seems to be slapstick comedy before it descends into a dark tragedy. In this image below, the young Sawyer and Finn are starting their search for treasure. Huck has a bruise over his eye from his father beating him, and he allows Tom to drag him into criminal activities for which he is initially arrested as a juvenile because Tom supports him running away from his father to spend time in their fantasy world. If these two kids carried the rest of the movie, it might have turned out a lot better…Fig. 15. Willem Miller as Young Tom Sawyer, left, and Gabriel Bateman as Young Huck Finn.None of Twain's plot or moral is retained, and their adventures are equated with modern gangsters willing to kill for a few dollars. I never understand why films like this use known authors and character names in the public domain without even calling the film by the popularly known titles. From glancing at the title and the description, I had no idea this would be a mockery of Mark Twain. Some ideas expressed in Mark Twain's adventures are taken out of context, and see ridiculously out of place in this interpretation. Here is an example of a scene where Tom is trying to convince Huck to commit a bigger crime than the one they just barely pulled off. "We had an adventure, nobody got hurt, and we're all a few bucks rich, eh?" Tom says. "Thomas, the situation is, we put ourselves in danger again, for nothing," Huck replies. "We got some money." "There's no money! I gotta pay Horhay! I gotta give him thirty dollars. The driver. I'm barely going to break even on this." "All right. Well, you can be the one who gets the special coin then…" Tom stretches the coin out to Huck. Huck does not take it: "You know the woman I live with keeps telling me that I need to change. She says, if I don't change, I'm gonna end up in a bad place. Of course, I wish, I was already in a bad place." Chuckles. "She's trying to sell me on heaven, you know. She's tellin' me that all you do all day is you sit down, you play harp, you sing songs for all eternity. And I said to her, if that's the case, I better sweat it out in hell with my best friend, Tom Sawyer, than play the harp, and, and… with Moses. I'm not friends with Moses." Then he reverses his position and says that still he has to change because he just "got out of prison" and he doesn't want to go back. The switch is too abrupt. In Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain does indeed present a band of robbers but they are crooks that both Huck and Tom work to help to prevent from committing crimes. The youths are hunting for treasure, but stop short of committing crimes to find it, and if they stumble into doing the wrong things, like pretending to be dead, they usually right these wrongs because of moral and religious motivations. It certainly speaks to the modern age that in this re-imagining the villains and the heroes are united into anti-heroes and they are partially redeemed in the end without fully atoning for their very serious sins: murder, theft, armed assault, etc. So, this discussion about Moses and heaven feels hacked inFig. 16. Matthew Gray Gubler (left), Hannibal Buress (center), Kyle Gallner (right), and Adam Nee in front with the gun.The whole film feels like a revenge fantasy by two students that flunked their exams on Mark Twain's novels and decided to re-write the stories to prove that what they imagined happened in the narrative was really the case.Fig. 17. The treasure of gold coins.The acting is also unconvincing, as it's unbelievable that Tom, despite being a police officer, is an illiterate idiot. I would fully support the portrayal of police officers in this light, but I think this would have had to be a tragedy rather than a comedy to pull this point off. This film is memorable, but disturbing for any serious literature readers. If you've never read Mark Twain, you should feel pretty good about it all, but I hope you will not base your high school quiz answers on this plot line. Title: Band of Robbers Directed/ Written by: Aaron Nee, Adam Nee Stars: Kyle Gallner (Huck Finn), Adam Nee (Tom Sawyer), Matthew Gray Gubler (Joe Harper) Genre: Adventure; Comedy; Crime Rating: R Running Time: 95 min Release: 2015

I just saw an "on-demand" showing of this movie at our downtown relic independent theater (the old Wurlitzer is still there from way back when!)The father-in-law of one of the leads was a high school friend, and a neighbor, and word spread through the grapevine asking everyone in our class to recruit three or four more friends to go along. We almost filled the enormous old theater! This movie is amazingly well done, and being done on a very tight budget made it all the more interesting. How did they do so much, so creatively and so well? The friend told us it had been considered for Sundance, receiving several nominations. It will be on Netflix soon, so look for it! And if you watch it through a haze of some premium bourbon, it would be even better!

Classic characters from perhaps the greatest literary work of American literature, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer have hit the big screen, in a re-imagining that takes their mischievously- intentioned, hero-of-the-story selves, keeps a driving plot about finding a mythic treasure, and leaves the rest behind – and to good-spirited, well-earned fun in the new film, 'Band of Robbers'.It should be stated early, there's not a whole lot that 'Robbers' truly, truly, lifts from Mark Twain's classic novel or characters other than using the characters' likeliness and winning charms to drop them into this new culture mash-up. It's really just the story of a version of a Huck Finn (Kyle Gallner) and a Tom Sawyer (Adam Nee), where Huck is a recent prison release looking to make clean and Tom is a wily cop whose adventure-seeking ways leads to his character's charming but still law-skirting flirtations, and through this all, they still remain the best of friends, along with a band of other self-affirmed misfit pirate pals.The faces and talents enlisted here are truly where the comedy shines. It has the taste of 21 Jump Street comic-firing and timing of every-line-a-joke (and mostly bulls eye's at that), uses some familiar faces and some not-so, in playing a winning hand. Kyle Gallner as Huck is a Jeremy Renner and Rick Grimes a la The Walking Dead, where Adam Nee is as much as stand- out in a role that he knows so well. The geek-beloved Matthew Gray Gubler as Joe Harper, along with Hannibal Burress as Ben Rogers add a deep bench to the effort, with Burress (and "Greg…Knife" nailing every one of his scenes). Melissa Benoist and Eric Christian Olsen also star as little-used Becky Thatcher, Tom's new partner on the day of the planned heist (mention heist) and Sid Sawyer, beloved detective who plays it maybe a bit too straight.Written and directed by brother filmmaking team Aaron and Adam Nee, 'Robbers' went through many years of development (including an idea of it being a TV show) before finally having its world premiere at the LA Film Festival. One wonders what following that version of Huck, Tom, and company may have been like, and what many adventures they may have spun in and out of in sit-com fashion. But its final format of a ninety-five-minute feature film feels like the best use of its talent, sparing any over-indulgence in what could have flopped as a gimmick and succeeds as a send-up that breathes fresh life into an American classic.

This could have went so wrong. I'm thinking of when they did this in Hook and turn Peter Pan into an adult, but Band of Robbers works really well.The acting was superb. So was the writing. From the moment you see Huck Finn and Tom on the screen you got the feeling of two dudes who never out grew who they were as children and it was fantastic.Tom and Huck still looking for treasure and adventure and they seem not to care about who gets in there way.As a whole, the movie was a great expedience to watch. It was a quirky funny and a little dark.