The Hitcher

Directed by Dave Meyers, The Hitcher follows Zachary Knighton’s Jim and Sophia Bush’s Grace as they’re stalked and menaced by Sean Bean’s sinister (and malevolent) John Ryder. Filmmaker Meyers, working from Eric Red, Jake Wade Wall, and Eric Bernt’s screenplay, delivers an exceedingly (and often excessively) slick thriller that gets off to a relatively promising start, as the movie kicks off with an opening stretch that effectively establishes Bean’s unstoppable and completely vicious antagonist – with the watchable atmosphere heightened by the actor’s less-than-subtle, scenery-chewing turn as the seemingly unstoppable John Ryder. (Knighton and Bush are affable enough, certainly, yet it’s impossible to deny that the performers are rarely able to breathe any real life into their distinctly one-dimensional figures.) It’s disappointing to note, then, that The Hitcher progresses into a mostly underwhelming midsection that stresses Jim and Grace’s ongoing (and increasingly tedious) encounters with the police, with the less-than-captivating bent of this portion of the proceedings slowly-but-surely draining the viewer’s interest and transforming the picture into a fairly disposable, forgettable endeavor. (This is despite a thoroughly spellbinding and gleefully ludicrous interlude wherein John takes out four police cars and a helicopter (!) with a handgun.) And although the movie closes with an admittedly fun and unpredictable final 15 minutes, The Hitcher has, by that point, cemented its place as a distressingly ineffective thriller that rarely lives up to the promise of its setup and Bean’s far-from-subtle performance.

** out of ****