I watched this movie when it was first available on Netflix several years ago. Last night I was looking for something to watch and decided to watch it again. Only, I didn't know I was watching it again; I was a good 30 minutes into it before I realized I'd seen it before. Now, I can remember movies and lines from movies I watched a decade ago, two decades ago, just ask my wife. Yet I'd completely forgotten watching this movie until a particular scene jogged my memory...apparently it's that forgettable.
A lot of reviewer here are comparing it to Wind River and they're right, the plot is very similar and they're also right that Wind River is a far superior movie. But what's so egregious here is not so much that they copied that movie, it's that they did it so badly. If you're employing the writers they did here don't even attempt to copy a great movie like Wind River.
The writing is lazy and nonsensical and really just stupid. Characters do things that make no sense throughout, especially the two main characters. There are no consequences or lasting effects for anything they do or anything that happens to them. Major injuries are shrugged off, laws are broken with no consequences, characters do things no even marginally intelligent person would ever do. A prime example of this is the main character finally identifying the killer and just walking into his house without a thought...with a screwdriver from his truck his only protection! No one is that stupid, except apparently the people who wrote this movie, or they think the viewing public is. There's a lot more of that type of thing but after awhile it all seemed to blur together.
So after realizing I'd seen it before but still not really remembering it I watched the rest of it. Ok, I was probably just too lazy to look for something else to watch and let's be honest, Annabelle Wallis is not hard to look at. But that brings me to another major flaw in this movie; Who thought it was a good idea to cast an English actress who looks like a supermodel as the sheriff of a backwater mid-western town??? Ms. Wallis is a good actress but even she couldn't pull that off. She looked absurd in the role and off the top of my head I can think of so many other actresses who would have been a better choice...dozens of them.
Coster-Waldau is much better as the drunk washed up hunter. His character does some galactically stupid things in this movie but that's not his fault, he didn't write the script. He does the best he can with what's there.
Zahn McClarnon also does a pretty good job in his role and his character isn't called upon to be quite as dense as the others in the movie so he's got that going for him.
Overall the plot is just bad, in the end the killer comes out of nowhere and we're given absolutely no explanation about how he became such a skilled hunter and why he decided to kill young girls and cut their vocal cords. His daughter was killed by a drunk driver not a young girl. And as far as we know that drunk driver wasn't a mute. I kept thinking that there must have been additional scenes explaining all this that had been edited out. The movie only has a 90 minute run time so if that's true they really should have left them in...or shot them in the first place.
Worst of all though is that the writers resorted to the most amateurish trope in writing; having a character that's barely in the film and that we know nothing about end up being the killer.
So I watched this movie twice and while it did have a few good points that was still two times too many.
A lot of reviewer here are comparing it to Wind River and they're right, the plot is very similar and they're also right that Wind River is a far superior movie. But what's so egregious here is not so much that they copied that movie, it's that they did it so badly. If you're employing the writers they did here don't even attempt to copy a great movie like Wind River.
The writing is lazy and nonsensical and really just stupid. Characters do things that make no sense throughout, especially the two main characters. There are no consequences or lasting effects for anything they do or anything that happens to them. Major injuries are shrugged off, laws are broken with no consequences, characters do things no even marginally intelligent person would ever do. A prime example of this is the main character finally identifying the killer and just walking into his house without a thought...with a screwdriver from his truck his only protection! No one is that stupid, except apparently the people who wrote this movie, or they think the viewing public is. There's a lot more of that type of thing but after awhile it all seemed to blur together.
So after realizing I'd seen it before but still not really remembering it I watched the rest of it. Ok, I was probably just too lazy to look for something else to watch and let's be honest, Annabelle Wallis is not hard to look at. But that brings me to another major flaw in this movie; Who thought it was a good idea to cast an English actress who looks like a supermodel as the sheriff of a backwater mid-western town??? Ms. Wallis is a good actress but even she couldn't pull that off. She looked absurd in the role and off the top of my head I can think of so many other actresses who would have been a better choice...dozens of them.
Coster-Waldau is much better as the drunk washed up hunter. His character does some galactically stupid things in this movie but that's not his fault, he didn't write the script. He does the best he can with what's there.
Zahn McClarnon also does a pretty good job in his role and his character isn't called upon to be quite as dense as the others in the movie so he's got that going for him.
Overall the plot is just bad, in the end the killer comes out of nowhere and we're given absolutely no explanation about how he became such a skilled hunter and why he decided to kill young girls and cut their vocal cords. His daughter was killed by a drunk driver not a young girl. And as far as we know that drunk driver wasn't a mute. I kept thinking that there must have been additional scenes explaining all this that had been edited out. The movie only has a 90 minute run time so if that's true they really should have left them in...or shot them in the first place.
Worst of all though is that the writers resorted to the most amateurish trope in writing; having a character that's barely in the film and that we know nothing about end up being the killer.
So I watched this movie twice and while it did have a few good points that was still two times too many.
