I have no idea what happened in Inside Out. None. There was something about bootleg cigarettes, a whole lot about the nuances of pickle-making, Michael Rapaport wearing a hat he must have stolen from a hipster on the L-train, and I could have sworn Bruce Dern was there, too. But beyond that, I'm lost.This wasn't for lack of paying attention, by the way, the thing just doesn't make any sense. The movie is a crime caper that was about two drafts from being coherent, to say nothing of enjoyable. What starts as a formulaic but fun story of a bad man gone straight goes off the deep end real fast; twists pile on top of each other in service of nothing, characters are killed and arrested and it barely registers, and save for a strong performance by the WWE superstar Triple H in the lead, the whole damn movie veers further and further into complete nonsense until it just kind of stops. Which is kind of a shame, because there are some pretty good people in it. The movie opens with Jack (Michael Rapaport, who's got to finance those documentaries somehow), a chatty twerp whose best friend, AJ (Triple H), is on his way home from a 13-year stint in jail after killing a man to save Jack's life. While AJ was laid up in the joint, Jack took over as placeholder for him; he even married the big man's old high-school sweetheart (Parker Posey) and started a family with her. No, AJ's not bitter, because he is a lovable ex-con and therefore a freaking saint. Jack's father (Bruce Dern) is also some kind of po-dunk crime lord who's looking for some new muscle and has his eye set on AJ. But, like any movie ex-con worth his salt, all AJ wants to do is peaceably live out some quirky dream, in this case, he wants to be a pickle-maker. Seriously.So far, so good, right? But then some guy gets shot in a bar and it all goes belly-up from there. Happily, the movie got at least one thing right in casting Triple H -- real name Paul Levesque -- as its lead, mainly because the guy's got some chops (acting, not mutton, although he's got those, too). He looms larger than life on WWE TV, and while watching him here you never get the sense of a movie star in the making, his skillful handling of an understated character suggests there's a real actor beneath the muscles.With eyes that seem glued to the ground and Tarzan hair that shades his face like a hood, the gentle giant thing comes easier to him than, say, Schwarzenegger, or even, to a degree, The Rock. Triple H isn't as polished as either one of those guys (and he lacks Rock's blinding baby face), but he makes for a naturally subdued screen presence and he's easily believable as a big softie; AJ looks like he's always trying to disappear into thin air, and his gaze never seems to find anybody else's. He's a guy who doesn't want to be known, and while Triple H can't handle AJ's shifts into a violent tough guy (they're handled so bluntly they come off like mood swings more than relapses), the performance is nothing scoff at. If only it came with a better movie. Inside Out doesn't just waste his performance, but it wastes everyone else's, too. Rapaport manages some pathos towards the end, but otherwise his Jack is one of the more shouty, irritating characters in recent memory. Posey, who's actually shared scenes (and well) with Triple H before in Blade: Trinity, merely does Concerned Wifey things as the Concerned Wife, and Julie White hems and haws as an FBI agent who's also involved in this mess, looking like she got lost on the way to the Transformers set. As the bad guy, Dern is called upon to do very little, and he phones it in satisfyingly as slime incarnate. Say what you will, but at least he gets what he signed up for.
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