Things Deadfall has going for it: Fun action, good performances from Eric Bana and Sissy Spacek, naked Olivia Wilde.
Things Deadfall has going against it: Very stupid.
Deadfall is a rather stupid movie that thinks it is a very smart movie. It desperately wants to be Fargo — it’s a grim, darkly comic story of gratuitously accented Midwesterners killing each other in snowy locales, with northern Michigan replacing Fargo’s exaggerated Minnesota — but director Stefan Ruzowitzky (Lilly the Witch: The Dragon and the Magic Book) and first-time screenwriter Zach Dean don’t have Joel and Ethan Coen’s (True Grit) capacity for well-drawn characters and thematic complexity.
Still, for all its misguided pretentions of artistry, Deadfall is a rather enjoyable movie. It’s not quite guilty enough to qualify as a guilty pleasure, but it certainly works its hardest to convince you of its idiocy. It’s fun in a dumb, ’80s action movie sort of way — it’s not as outrageous and wanton as a golden-era Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone vehicle, but, as with Commando, First Blood and their ilk, it makes you suffer through an awful lot of cheese between moments of vicious ownage.
The film kicks off when queasily intimate brother-and-sister duo Addison (Eric Bana, Hanna, doing the same bad Southern accent he first showcased in Black Hawk Down) and Liza (Olivia Wilde, The Words, speaking in an equally misbegotten drawl) get in an auto wreck halfway to the Canadian border after knocking off a Native American casino. Caught in the middle of nowhere in a blizzard with the law in pursuit, the two decide to split up and rendezvous once they make it to Ontario.
Addison, a sharp-tongued Angel of Death excellently played with equal parts eye-twinkling wit and unstable savagery by Bana, cuts a bloody trail through the backwoods of the Upper Peninsula while Liza uses her feminine charms to hitch a ride with ex-boxer and parolee Jay (Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy, brooding as always), who is himself eager to avoid any entanglements with the police despite being the son of an ex-lawman (Kris Kristofferson, Joyful Noise).
The plot is driven more by coincidence than character, which is never a good sign. The film indulges in every crime-thriller trope it can think of, from fixed boxing matches to abusive parents — it even imports a few stereotypes from other genres, such as a magical Native American — and is populated by stock characters who speak in cliches when they’re not delivering forced exposition.
Ruzowitzky and Dean keep straining for profundity, but their attempts at subtext either come across as too vague — there’s a lot of talk of family and home that never really coheres into anything meaningful — or too on-the-nose, such as the eye-roll-inducing closing voice-over, without ever finding the sweet spot in between.
Still, if you treat it less as the thoughtful noir it so wants to be and more as the brain-dead actioner it really is, it’s pretty damn fun. By the time the snowmobile chase sequence rolls around, it should be abundantly clear what kind of movie this is — it’s not exactly Touch of Evil — and the best response is to simply follow Deadfall down the bloody, moronic rabbit hole.
It’s more than worth it. The film climaxes with a Thanksgiving feast held at gunpoint, with new guests/hostages wandering in and adding powder to the keg every few minutes. It’s suspense played as farce, or maybe farce played as suspense, that’s as tense as it is comic. (What’s the proper etiquette when an armed home invader lights up a cigarette in your kitchen? Is it acceptable to ask him to open a window?) When the pot finally boils over, it’s as brutal and exciting as one can hope for.
Ruzowitzky, director of the solid Holocaust film The Counterfeiters, has a grasp of filmmaking fundamentals and style that he puts to good use in Deadfall’s moments of violence. He has the capacity to shock, surprise and thrill. If only the scenes between those bursts of action weren’t so flat, he might have had a classic on his hands. Ultimately, much like its antihero, Addison, it’s a film more skilled with violence and humor than with people and pathos. It’s a meat-and-potatoes movie that spends all its time on the meat and screws up the potatoes.
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