hyped garbage

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Mr Dahl is a filmmaker who makes movies, I really like. He's made his score of road movies, and I love the backdrops in his film. In what is his first Indie cinematic film, Kill Me Again, prefore, I get the feeling he's outdone himself, but not for the better. True, he has pulled off something slick, but there are too many similarities and coincidences. Penniless drifter Cage arrives in Red Rock, a real nice locale, buzzing with activity (joke) I wouldn't mind visiting, where he's mistaken for a hit-man, by bar owner and sheriff (Walsh). Of course, if your a begging state of affairs, you naturally take the money, as Cage so conveniently does, assuming the role. But obviously from these scenarios, what ensues isn't good, as stolen money is dead money. He's being payed to kill Walsh's beautiful wife (Laura Flynn Boyle) but he of course, has other ideas, and if you haven't seen it, you have a good idea of where this well and tight structured plot to film, heads, with a couple of twists. I couldn't really swallow how Walsh could just make this stranger out as the one, he's paid to kill his wife. Is his bar that empty during week days, or does Cage have the hit-man look? Every performance, big or small, impresses, notably Boyle and Hopper as the real larger than life, hit-man, lapping it up as another morbid character, where again, with Walsh, we realize what a talented and important actor we lost. I also liked Timothy Carhart's performance a lot as the tall suss deputy. He was the badarse in Beverly Hills Cop 3. His tooth pick chewing partner too, is done solid by Dan Shor (Black Moon Rising). Of course, Hopper steals every scene. Being honest, the least best performance was Cage, as I've seen better from him. He's still quite good here. Still like other Dahl films, it's entertaining from start to finish, but I could run off a string of better films he's made. I just feel it didn't carry enough clout.

The plot is so complicated that it becomes simple after a while since everyone is crooked and all are twisted and there is no straight criminal in this film, no honest citizen either. Everyone is trying to take the others unawares and fool them around and get out of the trap with the money and apart form the only one who was not a criminal at the start, no one will get anything out of this case: all the money will end up in the bushes or in the sheriff's office, once the sheriff has been taken care of. So just follow the ranting story and try not to rave into some nightmare during the night. It is just entertainment and just silly mushy mucky thieving business with all the thieves trying to rob all the others of their shares. But it is true the plot is so tricky it will bring surprises all the time. But be careful there might be a con man or a hit man behind every single tree of this treeless waste land in Wyoming whose only way out is the train.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

John Dahl's Red Rock West is a neat, taut, stripped down piece of cut-and-thrust film-making without gimmickry nor a single false string attached. In a current contemporary world of American film-making, and one that was almost certainly predominant at the time of Red Rock West's inception, how wonderful it is to uncover a film that refrains from the over indulgence of extravagance and the ideology that awe is built on a foundation of overkill and visuals. That's not to say Red Rock West is without extravagance nor awe, such is Dahl's ability, that the film is full of a number of various incidences and twists that are exactly these things and gotten across by way of little more than a glance from one of the character's or an individual cut of the camera. When we hark back to America's independent cinematic boom of the late 1980s and going on into the early 1990s, certainly a boom that saw a number of films and individual directors both honoured and recognised on the European film circuit at the top level in a series of Golden Palm nominations, the displaying of Red Rock West shows we must not glance over the name of Dahl when speaking of both the films and directors of that era, namely: the Coen Brothers; Steven Soderburgh; Spike Lee and Tarantino, et al.The film revolves around Nicolas Cage's character named Michael Williams, an ex-Marine of American nationality down on his luck and strapped for money in the dusty outback of Wyoming. He lives out of his car; uses random road side troughs full of water as makeshift sinks and struggles to find work, the latest failing being a construction site job that doesn't come through, although later on, he'll find ample opportunity at constructing something: a monstrosity of a scenario for himself. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he's going into the misadventure he'll come to have with a prior tragedy of having served time in the Vietnam War, but suffering during this stretch at the hands of a missile attack on a base in Lebanon he was positioned at which forced him into enduring a glut of both chaos and death. The event that may very well lend itself to Williams' dishevelled and down-beat tone and attitude, something Cage pulls off in that naturalistic manner he's done so on occasion since, shares eerie parallels with what will come to unfold around him as another glut of death and chaos unfolds around a man who has signed up for something you only realise you don't want to be anywhere near when it gets ugly as 'wrong place – wrong time' scenario once again kicks in.The devilish premise sees Williams pretend to be the Texan hit-man an apparent bar owner named Wayne (Walsh) called for some days ago so as to do some local dirty-work he wants taken care of. His looming over a seated Cage whilst in the office an early establishing of power, the sort of power that he'll come to have over him as Williams is forced throughout into proverbially dancing to the tune of others. But rather than eliminate the target, Wayne's wife played by Lara Flynn Boyle, Williams warns her of the predicament and that her marriage ought quite clearly be an item of concern form here on in. Once all is said and done, the real hit-man in Dennis Hopper's Lyle shows up in jet black Texan attire and similarly coloured car more resembling a hearse than anything else, whilst developments and complications in exactly who it is the chief of police is in the whole area open up.For Cage's character, and like in most good film noir when dealing with the down-trodden lead whom treads a fine line between right and wrong, the persistent idea of torn morals floats to the surface relatively quickly and consistently in Red Rock West. In just observing the premise, the notion of Williams illegally accepting the offer of being paid to kill someone before refraining from doing it when confronted with the innocent figure of Wayne's wife, Dahl highlights his character's soon-to-be prominent ever shifting; ever changing attitudes to what crime infused activity is playing out around him. Throughout, Williams lies; shoots; kills and steals but additionally saves; offers salvation and actually avoids violence on several occasions when straight forward murder would have offered a simple way out of a predicament. Given this, Dahl expertly manoeuvres Williams from one town in the form of Red Rock to another and then back over the border again, a sort of physical flitting from one place to another in what is a physical manifestation of both the above theories of a film noir's male lead as well as Cage's character's constantly ambiguous hopping from justified in his actions to not as so.Red Rock West moulds a fascinating, and quite terrifying at times, tale out of all these elements; combining a number of items such as double-crosses; multiple identities and intense connections characters have with one another, the sorts that they're forced into forging before later being asked what they truly mean to them. Dahl additionally, and in a very basic sense, taps into a certain idea of post-war disillusionment through his lead in Williams' disconnection from the rest of society seeing him inhabit a desolate and often incomprehensible rural locale in which he just about scrapes by. This, as an old war injury refrains him from making any true advancement in a chosen field of work. Red Rock West is a tight, gripping piece; the sort that arrives with a steady and effective eye on a variety of items all the while under the control of a steady, focused hand.

John Dahl knows his film-noir, and he knows his westerns. This should be assumed from seeing Red Rock West, though his 'noir' influence comes through in other films as well (Kill Me Again and to a degree Joy Ride). He knows how to write a lone average-Joe type of character, and the shady villain, and a sexy Femme Fatale. He knows this, but he also fills his story of a drifter coming to a small Wyoming town and being (accidentally?) hired to kill a man's wife with some top-shelf talent. Or, at least, the best actors that could make the parts their own.It's a cold little movie where you realize pretty quickly that despite Michael's "nice-guy" quality, he's still a potential thief and is the comparatively not so bad. Not so bad compared to Wayne the "bartender" or "Sheriff", if that is indeed his name, and his wife who wants to escape to Mexico with all of the money she "inherited" (please note the quotations). An extra slice of danger comes with the appearance of the actual man hired to kill the woman, Lyle from Dallas played by the late Dennis Hopper. His character and performance is far less aggressive than in Blue Velvet, though this is like comparing a Tasmanian Devil to a bull at a fight.I liked the suspense, of not knowing who might double-cross who next or where the story might go depending on who is alive, and I also liked that they gave each character something to them. Michael and Lyle meet up the first time under unusual circumstances and he gives Michael a ride, where they each find out they were marines, Michael formerly a fighter in a botched mission in Lebanon. This is mentioned about halfway into the film, but it helps to set up this guy as a somewhat tragic figure, without a home and without a job but all of those memories he'd rather not take with him. Certainly not to Mexico, where he has nice ones with his father.Again, the casting and the writing is what makes the film. Lara Flynn Boyle works just about perfect as the female figure of desire and greed, and even if we've seen something like her before she's still fresh because of her performance. JT Walsh is also good but in a different way, where he's a lot more careful with his words, but one can see the look of panic when it surely comes. And Nicolas Cage, at first seemingly a little bored with the part in the opening scenes, really makes it his own as a reluctant hero with nothing to lose. Dialog is used in the film only so much to keep things moving along, but I mean this as a compliment; it's not minimalism, but economy of speech if that makes sense. Dahl knows exactly what he wants in his B-movie premise, and it's like he's taken material sitting on a shelf for years and dusted it and made it vital again.