Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Everyman and Everywoman have car trouble in the Utah/Arizona/California desert, and must deal with suspicious characters.
Biased, pithy comments: ``It could happen to you...'' says the trailer ominously. Well, only if the crooks around me were kinda idiots. This is one of those movies from the ``River Wild'' school of filmmaking; take a family, strand them somewhere where it's fairly cheap to film, and set them up against small-time, violent crooks who take prisoners too often and don't just kill people and move on. I thought this movie was going to be smarter than it was, and indeed, from some of the early staging it felt like Mostow thought he was writing the next ``Spanish Prisoner,'' but as the story unfolds and begins to resemble some sort of mutant cross between ``Ransom'' and ``The Dukes of Hazzard,'' atmosphere and intelligence leave and are replaced by low-budget thriller stuff. It wasn't badly done, for what it was trying to do, I suppose, but it had such little reach it was utterly forgettable.
Other Notes: I'm not supported. A few people came out of this film and didn't like it, but critics seemed to like it as a brainless summer action flick that quotes Hitchcock well. Yow.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Kurt Russell, J.T. Walsh, Kathleen Quinlan, M.C. Gainey, Jack Noseworthy, Rex Linn.
Directed by: Jonathan Mostow