Wants to be “Die Hard” in an airport. 20 minutes of set up and exposition before it got interesting, a fun ride for an hour, ridiculous but well shot action sequences in the 3rd act. It is what it is. Unlike “Die Hard”, once was enough and it will not be on the Christmas movie rotation list.
3 stars for Jason Bateman, production value, and a good job by the cast doing their best with a thin script full of improbable and impossible situations resolved by improbable and impossible solutions.
Technically superb with top notch performances and production value through the roof. But too much artifice designed to evoke emotions and not enough learned about the main character to make me fully invested in their story. I felt like I was watching a 1950’s newsreel with a 100 million dollar budget.
Maggie Gyllenhaal boldly delivers a masterpiece in her directorial debut. This film is difficult, complex, unconventional, uncompromising, and an amazing achievement for the cast and crew that had the audacity to even attempt a film so fraught with unpleasant subject matter, loads of internal dialog, flashbacks to fill in the story, and had so much going on under the surface nobody could possibly have all of the answers. I’m not sure how anybody thought it would translate to the…
Awkward first act but eventually becomes a pretty good movie. Saved by the unlikely relationship between the main character who’s trying to escape a remote area alive and the man who helps her, a local meth cook. They’re both harassed by a crooked sheriff and his henchmen. Anytime a film can make you care about people as far apart on the socioeconomic scale as a wholesome college girl and backwoods meth cook it’s done its job. Add in a menacing villain and a tense final act and you’ve got something pretty good. Just took a while to get going.
