If you heard someone
beating on your door several times within 30 seconds and weren’t
expecting company, would you maybe look through the peephole before
opening up? Would you head off without taking your cell phone or wallet?
And would you agree to go
anywhere in the car with a stranger in a fedora (Samuel L Jackson) who’s
clearly a little off, if not crazy? Regular guy John (Luke Wilson) does all of these
things. There you have, or maybe you don’t have, the problem I had with
this movie, which is quite suspensefully
directed by TV veteran Chris Fisher, who adapted a novel by Thomas Berger. Jackson has played crazy before, but this is a new kind
of crazy, and we’re not sure what sort this is. In any case, he leads John, just fired from his job but hiding it from his wife, on a one-day odyssey through some his very recent, mistake-filled past.
The setup suggests that the passive John will be pushed too far and get all badass, but the tone is of some sort of philosophical movie, like Fight Club, maybe. Berger also wrote the novels on which the (very different) films Little Big Man and Neighbors
were based is another clue that this isn’t supposed to be just an exploitation movie. Fisher conveys
existential themes, no
doubt more easily explored in a novel, partly by using location, both bland suburban ones and rural, desolate ones. Yet, although the worst
violence is off-screen, one reason this is a suspense drama
instead of a horror film, the sheer level of that violence
makes the plot ridiculous. Has the killer, whom we learn about later, really done this before and
not been caught? If not, why now?
Incidentally, Berger’s novel was published in 1992, before cell phones were common. Why didn’t Fisher just set the movie then instead of creating a series of awkward machinations (not just leaving the cell phone home) just so John won’t have a phone to use? This also would make it more plausible that a convenience store wouldn’t have security camera footage available. And, if a black man was going to play the second lead, perhaps it would have made sense to make the setting somewhere with a few more black people. That way, it won’t seem entirely too coincidental when, later, the only other black character in
the film happens to be in a place where he can be mistaken for Jackson’s.
If you interpret the fedora-clad
man as a symbolic character meant only to test John, perhaps such implausibilities
will bother you less than they did me. Maybe he is another version of the
killer in the Saw movies, who weaves
morality plays into his torture games. With, say, Bruce Willis as the lead instead of
the everyman-type Wilson, one can imagine the film building to a conclusion
in which nebbish becomes superhero and the villain dies by having a
construction crane land on top of him. The climax
is a close-enough approach to satisfy conventional expectations, but the
actual ending is about a husband, a wife, and an uncertain future. It’s the the best part, actually, but the titter of laughter I heard from the screening audience suggests that such subtlety was incongruous in a movie with so many bullet and plot holes.
viewed 4/20/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/1/12 and 5/13/12
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