Review: 'Ashby' With Mickey Rourke, Nat Wolff & Emma Roberts Is Good Hearted, But Slight

This is a reprint of the review that ran during the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.

No one knows their neighbors anymore. Tony McNamara’s off-kilter but admirably good-hearted “Ashby” makes such a case. Young Ed Wallis’ (Nat Wolff) neighbor is a former CIA agent with nearly a hundred kills under his fashionably distressed belt. Who would want to live next door to someone like that? Conveniently enough, Ed would. He's the new kid in town and doesn’t have any friends to speak of, and the combination of a contrived school assignment (basically, “meet an old person, talk to them, write about it”) and the discovery of the bluehair next door inspires Ed to make a pal out of Ashby (Mickey Rourke). Too bad the guy has secrets —government-sanctioned murder the least among them— that just might keep him from letting Ed in.

Just kidding! Ashby takes to Ed well enough, or at least he doesn't mind having a fresh-faced teen available to tote him to complete some mysterious missions, and the pair is...