99 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Lionsgate
Two detectives hunting a Florida serial killer cross paths with an undercover agent working a trafficking ring. The pieces of a real thriller are here. The movie never bothers to assemble them.
Rebecca Lombardo and Byron Crawford work a Florida sex-trafficking case that turns into a hunt for a serial killer. Karl Helter abducts women off the highway and dumps them in the switchgrass. The film treats this as backdrop rather than subject. It moves through the motions of a procedural without curiosity about the women it puts on screen or the men who kill them. The result is a thriller assembled from spare parts of better thrillers.
Megan Fox plays Rebecca Lombardo with more commitment than the script earns. She works undercover as a sex worker and sells the fear in those scenes. Bruce Willis plays Karl Helter and disappears from the film early, his scenes shot in flat isolation that never connects him to the rest of the cast. Emile Hirsch plays Byron Crawford as a haunted detective and recycles every haunted-detective beat in the genre. Lukas Haas plays the killer Peter Hillborough with a banality the film mistakes for menace.
Randall Emmett directs his first feature and stages every scene at the same low energy. Alan Horsnail’s script announces its themes in dialogue and then abandons them. The cinematography drains the Florida setting of heat and color, leaving the switchgrass as a gray smear behind the actors. The editing cuts between Willis and the main investigation as if the two were filmed for different movies. Nothing in the frame suggests a point of view.
The film has a real subject in the trafficking it gestures toward and no interest in examining it. It uses dead and endangered women as set dressing for a killer it never bothers to understand. Every choice points toward the cheapest version of the material. Emmett takes a lurid premise and a recognizable cast and produces something with no pulse at all.