Red Hill

It’s hard not to walk away from Red Hill feeling a substantial amount of disappointment, as the film boasts a seemingly can’t-miss premise and an expectedly stirring turn from star Ryan Kwanten – yet writer/director Patrick Hughes manages to squander the movie’s overtly positive attributes on an all-too-frequent basis. The storyline follows rookie cop Shane Cooper (Kwanten) as he moves into a small town and sets out to start his first day of work, with the character’s uneventful shift inevitably becoming dangerous as an escaped convict (Tom E. Lewis’ Jimmy Conway) arrives on the scene seeking revenge for a past misdeed. It’s a spare setup that’s initially employed to promising effect by Hughes, as the filmmaker does an effective job of establishing the various characters and the sleepy environment within which they reside. And although the movie does boast a few admittedly suspenseful sequences in its early stages (eg Conway holds an elderly couple hostage), there reaches a point at which the consistently baffling behavior among the various characters becomes too much to comfortably stomach (eg Conway places himself in the line of fire on several occasions, and yet nobody takes a shot at him). By the time Hughes introduces a silly supernatural element, Red Hill has effectively established itself as a missed opportunity of disappointingly demonstrable proportions – with the inclusion of several interminably-paced, dialogue-free stretches compounding the movie’s less-than-enthralling atmosphere.

*1/2 out of ****