The beginning of the heist-thriller-romance Tuner feels for all the world like the opening scenes of a buddy cop comedy from the 1980s, with two guys rolling around in a vehicle, the older one annoying the younger one with various bits of unwanted advice while upbeat saxophone music plays underneath. Of course, these guys aren’t cops, they’re piano tuners, and while the older one is played by a very welcome Dustin Hoffman, this story is about the younger man, Niki, played by Leo Woodall in what may well end up being a star-making role.
Niki has a hearing condition that means he’s hypersensitive to sound, which makes him a great tuner, but which also means loud noises can be completely debilitating. And two things happen to him during the course of the movie that probably don’t typically happen to piano tuners—one is that he falls in love with a music conservatory student who he meets while tuning the piano on the school’s main stage, and the other is that he falls in with some clever criminals who realize Niki’s hearing abilities make him a perfect safecracker.
Niki makes good and bad decisions in both crime and love, although the better decisions are mostly with the young woman, Ruthie, who’s played by Havana Rose Liu, and who has such an easy chemistry with Woodall that we can’t help but be thoroughly charmed by the two of them. Shockingly, the movie achieves this by leaning into obvious cliches, even using the song “Almost Like Being in Love” during a montage of the two hitting it off. It’s as if the director, Daniel Roher, stopped watching movies in the early 1990s and thinks this is still how people make them. But what can I say, it works.
The crime stuff is also generally quite sharp and tense, although some late plot developments are silly and forced and pull us away from a better ending this movie probably deserved. Still, Tuner is smart, and fun, and romantic, and a throwback to the kinds of movies we’re really missing these days.
Tuner is in theaters.
