Look, we're fans of provocative art. Good filmmaking should challenge assumptions, make you uncomfortable, maybe even make you rethink your priors. But there's a difference between interrogating a social phenomenon and celebrating one that has materially gutted retail in the Bay Area.

Let's review the tape. San Francisco and Oakland have spent the last several years watching pharmacies shutter, grocery stores pull out of neighborhoods, and small business owners install security measures that make their shops look like fortresses. Walgreens closed multiple SF locations. Target cut store hours. The ripple effects landed hardest on the elderly, the car-less, and the low-income communities that lost walkable access to basic goods.

And now we get a film that treats boosting as folk heroism.

Riley is a talented director — Sorry to Bother You was genuinely creative and weird in the best way. He knows how to build a world and land a political point. But romanticizing retail theft isn't punching up. It's punching sideways — at the cashiers who get blamed, the store managers who lose their jobs, and the neighborhoods that lose their stores.

There's a version of this movie that could be genuinely interesting: one that explores why organized retail theft exploded, who profits from it (hint: not the people doing the grabbing), and what broken systems make it possible. That would be brave filmmaking.

Instead, we apparently got a love letter.

The Bay Area has real problems with inequality, housing costs, and a justice system that often fails both victims and defendants. Those deserve serious artistic treatment. But glamorizing the thing that accelerated neighborhood decline? That's not radical. It's just irresponsible — and the people who pay the price won't be sitting in the audience at the Grand Lake.