Name: Retro Film Review: Switchback (1997)
Item: Switchback
Rating: 40
Author: @drax

(source:tmdb.org)

Having few pleasant surprises isn't enough for a film to be pleasant surprise as a whole. Sometimes those surprisingly good elements only remind audiences how great talents and great ideas can be wasted, making the general impression of the film worse than usual. Switchback, 1997 thriller written and directed by Jeb Stuart, is one of such examples.

After a prologue in which babysitter gets killed and little boy kidnapped, the plot of the films follows four men. Buck Olmstead (played by R. Lee Ermey) is sheriff of Amarillo, Texas, whose bitter re-election campaign gets threatened by couple of nasty murders. Lane Dixon (played by Jared Leto) is quiet hitchhiker who wants to get to Salt Lake City and hides sinister secret from his past. Bobby Goodall (played by Danny Glover) is a former railroad worker who drives exotically decorated Cadillac to his friend. Frank La Cross (played by Dennis Quaid) is quiet lone FBI agent who comes to Amarillo in order to catch serial killer and might not be who says he is. Lives of all those four men are going to be intertwined during the massive snowstorm that wrecks Rockies.

Jeb Stuart is screenwriter who helped create some of the best or most influential action films in 1980s and 1990s. In Switchback his talent can be seen in brilliantly portrayed four characters and subplots around them. Those characters are set in those huge spaces that exists between Los Angeles and New York, seldom touched and explored by modern Hollywood. Stuart paints very realistic and convincing picture of small towns, petty local politics and working class lifestyle. Some of the characters are portrayed by very talented actors - Ermey is very effective as Sheriff Olmstead, while Glover portrays very likeable blue-collar protagonist. Quaid is somewhat too stiff in his role of La Cross, while Jared Leto is not that convincing as mysterious drifter.

But this isn't the greatest problem of Switchback. Taken separately, all those characters and subplots could have worked very well, but, here they are uncomfortably stuffed into rather predictable and formulaic serial killer plot. All great care about realistic locations or elaborate action scenes are wasted when the audience, familiar with Hollywood cliches, knows who the killer would be and how the film would end - not very convincingly, of course. All that doesn't mean that Switchback isn't watchable. But those who get high hopes in the beginning of the film are going to experience big disappointment at the end.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on December 5th 2003)