I read the book it's based on, based on an actual situation...I don't like the popular "Based on a Tre Story", as that has, often as not, come to mean based on a true fiction. And if one can believe anything in print, it is. With the exception of the precise circumstances of the anti-hero's death, which were, if possible, more brutal and pathetic then that which was depicted. "In fact", he was so defiant that when the heat bloated corpse was found, he was so defiant that he had dug a pit with his feet in the desert sand, so furiously defiant, that there was nothing left to do but kick his rage into the sand that devoured him. Still, it's captured well enough with a metaphoric vulture and his screams at the godless sky silently watching. The film opens with a Biblical quote and an actual photo of Gary Tison with his brothers as a child, and there is a recurrent substrate of Biblical comments and references, establishing Gary as a Satanic presence.
Robert Patrick is beautifully cast. He's another natural at bad guys, an actor that plays it close to the bone, so much more to him then the movie that made him famous. Heather Graham is the big surprise as his wife. I had to really look close to recognize her, and she plays a hard boiled "broad" here, a complicit gun-moll, trying to skirt the law. Bruce Davison was 71 years old but there is nothing vaguely sluggish in his work. It might be his best role, what a journey from "Short Eyes" where he was on the other side. This most benign featured of actors turns in a grim committed craggy performance. John Heard is another surprise.
He's surprisingly beefy, almost unrecognizable, playing a boobish warden that gets pinned down by Davison's lawman that does not settle for easy self serving answers.
The current IMDB rating of 5.9 is too low, and maybe it's because we are so jaded, and this isn't loaded with CGI and over the top surreal silliness. Patrick is at the center of it with his tough schizoid behavior, playing an extremely ruthless and "damaged goods" character. His loyal sons, innocents all, that broke him out of prison payed awful prices, getting sucked into the crazed sadistic murder spree
that follows. Not necessarily a flaw, but a dramatization of reality is in Tison's partner, Greenawalt, who in reality was a hugely obese slob and weak cowardly tag-along that enjoyed hurting and killing people.
In the movie he's given a lean and mean and dangerous persona, in keeping with his actual acts, but not in keeping with the actual person, a fat mouse with a gun and suppressed wrath, not the ideal combo
for a human.
In all, It's a tight, well scripted, straight-up, unembellished account that is 95% true to what I've read about it, for what that is worth, with good direction. It feels plausible, it has momentum. Patrick is a fine actor at the center, and I think it's an above average true crime story, you know, the real Amerikan Gospel, about people who do whatever the F they want, what we all suppress in the name of polite society.
Crime movies are violence pornography. They tantalize us with no risk of involvement with it's complications. This isn't erotic , but it has punch. It's far better then the earlier version with Spader. Check it out.
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