Gibson plays John Link, who has been clean and sober for several years and makes end meet by running a tattoo shop out of his trailer in the New Mexico desert. Burly and bearded and covered in ink, he tries to keep a low profile, attending weekly AA meetings and staying honest with help from his sponsor, Kirby (William H. Macy), who lives in a nearby trailer. His life is turned upset down when he receives a collect phone call from Lydia (Erin Morarity), his daughter who has been missing for several years. We see in the film’s opening sequence that she has become involved with Jonah (Diego Luna), a leader in a brutal drug cartel who takes her along to kill two associates he suspects of stealing from him. The job goes bad, blood is shed, and Lydia goes on the run. In desperation, she turns to John, who comes to retrieve her and hide her in his trailer. Unfortunately, that approach only lasts so long, as one night members of the cartel show up looking for her, after which the film turns into an extended road movie, with John and Lydia riding through the western landscape, holing up in cheap motels at night, trying to outrun the relentless men who are pursuing her. At one point, John reconnects with an old associate, Preacher (Michael Parks), who he thinks owes him and can help them, but like so much in the film, it ends up going bad.

Richet, working again with cinematographer Robert Ganz, who also shot Assault on Precinct 13 and Richet’s two-part French gangster epic Mesrine Part 1: Killer Instinct and Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy #1 (2008), approaches the material with a brute simplicity that matches its protagonist. The film is suffused with a dark Americana, personified primarily in the vast stretches of open landscape that were once the promise of a nation, but here look more than a dusty, existential vacuum into which John and Lydia are being inexorably drawn.

Gibson has always been a first-rate actor, and no one plays intensity of purpose, suffering, and rage quite like he does (there is a reason that his breakthrough role was in a film called Mad Max). With his long, gray bears and tattoo-stained flesh, he looks convincingly like a man with a dark past who has been living alone for too long, and he plays the role accordingly. There is much anger and profanity and intensity, but we grow to like the character more and more, perhaps because he is so fundamentally honest. Having been through all he’s been through, John has little left but to be true to his own nature. His drive to protect Lydia, even as she often does and says things that contradict his intentions, is primal, which at times comes at the cost of the film’s drama. While Gibson and Moriatry have good on-screen chemistry, their characters’ relationship never quite comes together the way it is intended, which makes the film less dramatically compelling than it probably should be. All the blood and sacrifice, which we have to come to expect in any action film bearing Gibson’s presence, overwhelms the dramatic impetus that compels it, leaving us with a gritty B-movie that aspires to something it doesn’t quite achieve.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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