A fledgeless lark involving three callow lunkheads embarking together on lives of crime. The debuting director is Wes Anderson, who affects jazzy, jaunty, New Wavy mannerisms which of course by this time are pretty Old Wavy, or Shore Drifty. And he favors squared-up and steam-pressed compositions for a homely deadpan American Gothicism. (The setting is for the most part indistinctive Texas.) Anderson's chief collaborator is Owen C. Wilson, co-screenwriter and lead actor (a kind of psychopathic Ricky Nelson with a Hitler's Youth blond brush-cut), as the self-appointed mastermind who has worked out a seventy-five-year crime-spree prospectus in a spiral notebook. A closing-time bookstore heist (the take is modest, though not infinitesimal: "Do you have a bigger bag for atlases and dictionaries and stuff?") finances a lie-low in an out-of-the-way motel, where one of the trio (Luke Wilson, Owen's brother in real life but mere buddy on screen) develops a crush on the Paraguayan housemaid and pitches in on her chores. (There is yet another Wilson brother, Andrew, in a lesser role.) It's a long wait until their next caper: a lunch-hour raid on a meatpacking plant in co-ordinated canary-yellow jumpsuits, sponsored by a small-time Mr. Big (James Caan, the one familiar face). The sense of humor may be -- surely is -- a little off-center, but the sense of strain at that particular latitude and longitude is as painful and ultimately deadly as at any middle-of-the-road locale. And the humor is not a lot off-center, in any event. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd