When he hears that his old acquaintance, a young man called Simon Weeks (Cory Monteith) has been released from prison early, policeman Eugene McCanick (David Morse) starts an increasingly irrational and dangerous attempt to find Weeks and most probably do something very violent to him. In a series of flashbacks, what at first seems like your classical movie revenge trip is revealed to be something more human and much sadder: the attempt of a coward to avoid having to look at himself in the mirror and be honest to himself for once in his life. As it goes with cases like this, other people will have to suffer so that McCanick won’t have to take responsibility for anything in his messed up life.
Even though Josh C. Waller’s direction is focused and clever, and the supporting actors are doing fine work, McCanick really is the David Morse show, a state of things that seems only fair towards an actor who has spent large parts of his career supporting others on screen. Not surprisingly, Morse makes the most out of the opportunity, providing McCanick with complexity and humanity even once the script has reached the point where the flashbacks disclose how petty the secret that drives McCanick actually is. That’s rather important in a film featuring a central character who is such a coward he’d rather see people dead than have someone walk around free who knows about his actual sexual preferences and who actually seems to think he could assuage his own feelings of guilt by just adding more and more to be guilty about.
Waller’s direction and Morse’s acting are good enough to keep McCanick interesting and human once this turning point in the film is reached, while Daniel Noah’s script takes great care to not forgot that the cop’s victims are human beings with all the good and bad that entails, too. It’s the kind of old-fashioned humanist approach films of this sub-genre have never been exactly full of, and thankfully in a version that does keep the hand-wringing down regardless.
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