89 min | R | May 22, 2020 | Lionsgate
A disgraced surgeon and his retired-sheriff father settle into a quiet night at the family ranch. Two wounded brothers force their way in and demand the doctor save the one bleeding out on the kitchen table. The hostages have more conviction than the movie does.
A surgeon named Rich Clark loses a patient and his nerve. He retreats to his rural family home with his wife Jan, his daughter Riley, and his father Frank, a former sheriff. Two brothers named the Grangers botch a robbery and one of them takes a bullet. They invade the Clark house and order Rich to operate at gunpoint. The film positions itself as a pressure-cooker thriller about a broken man rediscovering his competence under threat. It is really about arranging people in rooms and pointing guns until the credits arrive.
Bruce Willis plays Frank Clark, the retired sheriff, with the slack indifference of a man counting down to his next mark. He delivers his lines facing away from his scene partners. He registers a home invasion the way most people register a long wait for a bus. Chad Michael Murray plays Rich Clark with visible effort and nowhere to put it. Tyler Jon Olson plays Matthias Granger as a one-note heavy and Shea Buckner plays the wounded Jamie as a body on the floor. Lydia Hull as Jan and Riley Wolfe Rach as Riley exist to be tied up and threatened.
Matt Eskandari directs the single location with no feel for its geography. The film lights the Clark house in flat, overlit digital that turns the night exteriors into gray mush. Doug Wolfe’s script telegraphs every turn well before it lands. The standoff repeats one beat on a loop. A captive gains the upper hand and then surrenders it for no reason the scene can supply. The score swells to insist on tension the staging never builds.
Hostage thrillers live and die on geography and escalation. This one delivers neither. The Grangers demand the surgery and then stall for no purpose beyond stretching the standoff. Frank’s career in law enforcement promises a reversal that arrives with no weight behind it. The premise could power a lean genre exercise about a desperate doctor and a dying man. The film mistakes a locked door for suspense and a familiar face for a performance.