| Overall Grade: |
C |
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| Story: |
D |
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| Acting: |
B+ |
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| Direction: |
B |
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|
| Visuals: |
B |
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|
A sorry excuse for a thriller
by M (movies profile)
May 20, 2007
4
of
4 people found this review helpful
The only thing that kept me from rating this film any lower is the halfway decent albiet wasted acting from the young cast, especially a young beautiful jennifer jason leigh. The movie starts out well enough - c. thomas howell, on a cross country drive, picks up hitchhiker, rutger hauer, hoping for some company to keep himself awake. In the next five minutes of the film, rutger hauer and c.thomas howell both do a masterful job presenting themselves as a murderous psychopath and a scared, naive, young man. Unfortunately, the plot takes a nosedive after that initial sequence.
To sum up the rest of the movie, c.thomas howell is able to "eject" the hitcher from his car within a few moments after picking him up. However, the hitcher, for unknown reasons, becomes obsessed with thomas howell, and subsequently goes about framing him for a series of murders. The potential is there for a promising thriller - great cast, good direction, good cinematography. It's just too bad nobody bothered to refine the script. Like the previous reviewers wrote, there are just too many plot holes and irrational actions by the characters for this movie to be taken seriously. And even though it's categorized as a thriller, there is absolutely nothing scary or suspenseful about this film. I would even let a 5 year old watch it alone in the dark.
Overall, it's just slightly entertaining enough to sit through if you stumble across it on late-night cable. However, it's definitely not a film worth going out of your way to see. |
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