Blackway

This 90-minute movie is strangely slow and lifeless, a puzzlingly one-note tale. Anthony Hopkins' participation in this odd venture inspires hope that things might improve, but Blackway could easily have been told in 30 minutes with no tension or plot points lost. This feels like some artist's attempt at vicarious revenge against the class hulk who bullied him in middle school -- a generic bad guy does generic bad guy things and then is punished. But questions abound: How is Blackway so unusually bad that the local sheriff can't get state police to come and shut down the guy's meth lab and prostitution ring? It makes no sense.

Other maddening moments include a scene in which a guy takes all the bullets out of his gun while waiting to ambush a psychopathic killer! It strains believability to watch tiny, white-haired Les with one shotgun in a canvas cover drive through the grim, wintry terrain with huffy Lillian and stammering Nate cramped together in a pickup's cab, stopping here and there to hear from every uncooperative source that going after Blackway is a bad idea. OK, we get the picture. Many people caution, "This ain't your fight" -- advice Les notably ignores. But we never really find out why. At no point do we learn definitively that Blackway was responsible for the death of Les' daughter, which would at least suggest a reason for Les' otherwise inexplicable eagerness to hunt down a sociopathic criminal on behalf of someone else's daughter. Blackway is simply painted as some universal evil that needs to be rubbed out, to the absurd degree that Liotta's makeup lends him a resemblance to the Frankenstein monster. Dialogue is also egregiously bizarre. "Can I use the bathroom?" Lillian asks Les at his house. "Do you want to take a bath?" he asks. She says no, so he replies, "You want the can?" She says yes. "Then say so," he tells her. This is one odd movie.