Rating: B+
Dir: Sam Raimi
Star: Bill Paxton, Billy-Bob Thornton, Brent Briscoe, Bridget Fonda
Very reminiscent of the work of his long-time collaborators, the Coen brothers, Raimi’s latest film is also in the Shallow Grave genre: what do you do if you find a lot of money? In this case, $4.4m in a downed plane, and Paxton and his two less sure-footed conspirators decide to keep it and not tell anyone. Except, as you’d expect, it’s not that simple, and things gradually spiral out of control into tragedy of near-Shakespearean scale.
An extremely moral tale, proving honesty is definitely the best policy, with Thornton outstanding, even if the role as a dim-witted yokel is scarcely anything but familiar territory. The tension builds as the body-count climbs, and Paxton must deceive his wife (Fonda), as well as the suspicious local sheriff, until an FBI agent turns up, looking for the loot. But is he really what he seems? By this stage, I was growing familiar with the edge of my seat, and the climax delivers more than satisfactorily. Crunchy, effective and enough to make you pray you never stumble across a large quantity of apparently abandoned loot.