Cutter’s Way

Directed by Ivan Passer, Cutter’s Way follows Jeff Bridges’ Richard Bone as he witnesses a powerful man dumping a body and subsequently agrees to blackmail him with an unstable friend named Alex Cutter (John Heard). Filmmaker Passer, armed with Jeffrey Alan Fiskin’s screenplay, delivers an exceedingly (and sometimes excessively) deliberate drama that benefits from its stellar performances and raft of appealing, eye-catching attributes, with, in terms of the former, Bridges’ predictably top-notch efforts here often eclipsed by Heard’s spellbinding turn as the impulsive Cutter. (Heard’s live-wire work goes a long way towards elevating even the most minor of sequences, ultimately.) And although the movie’s languid atmosphere occasionally prevents the viewer from wholeheartedly connecting to the material, Cutter’s Way, which admittedly does boast its fair share of electrifying sequences (eg a grieving Cutter makes a scene at a horse race), boasts an appealingly atmospheric sensibility that’s heightened by Jordan Cronenweth’s smoky, striking cinematography and Jack Nitzsche’s appropriately moody score – which, when coupled with a larger-than-life yet satisfyingly ambiguous finale, cements the picture’s place as a mostly memorable endeavor that receives plenty of mileage out of Heard’s consistently magnetic efforts.

*** out of ****