Rating: C-
Director: Dwight H. Little
Star: Robert Patrick, Heather Graham, Bruce Davison, Chris Browning
To the film’s credit, I think this is probably more accurate to the facts than most “based on true events” movies. The problem is, facts are rarely nice and tidily cinematic. The makers here might have been better off dispensing with them, when they interfere with the story. It is certainly the case that in 1978, murderers Gary Tison (Patrick) and Randy Greenawalt (Browning) broke out of prison in Florence, Arizona, helped by Tison’s three sons. The original plan was to cross over the border into Mexico, but after that fell through, the five went on a two-week spree, criss-crossing the state, and in which six people were murdered during carjackings, before themselves dying or being recaptured.
The main issue here, is the script tries to spread itself too thinly. Partly, this is due to a desire to stay truthful. If you were writing a fictional story, for example, you would not give Tison three sons. One would be sufficient. Two, tops, perhaps if you wanted to draw a contrast between them. Here, Donald (Alex MacNicoll) is the only son given enough to do, to justify his existence in the story. The others are literally just passengers. The same goes on a larger level. In addition to the criminals, the movie also tries to tell the story of Sheriff Cooper (Davison), the fictional lawman hunting the escapees, as well as Tison’s wife, Dorothy (Graham), and her relationship with a sympathetic (so clearly fictional…) journalist.
It’s all too much: focusing on one or two of these would have helped. This is despite performances that are generally good, though John Heard looks near-dead as the prison warden. Patrick and Browning, in particular, have a nasty presence, feeding off each other’s viciousness. Anyone who crosses their path might as well be flipping coins with Anton Chigurh. Though, again, having read about the events before watching, the film hews closely to who lives and who dies. I’d recommend avoiding those specifics, and to be fair, this came out almost forty years after it happened, plenty of time for the details to be forgotten. [In 1983, much closer to events, there was a TV movie, Killer in the Family, starring Robert Mitchum as Tison, with then-unknowns James Spader and Eric Stoltz as sons].
Disappointingly, the film does a pretty poor job of pretending to be Arizona. The film supposedly roams from Florence to up by Flagstaff, which have radically different landscapes. People often forget Arizona isn’t all desert. Our average elevation is 4,100 feet, and the higher altitudes are cooler, forested and have squirrels the size of velociraptors. Not here, where everything looks suspiciously like southern California. Despite the amount of time spent outdoors, and on the highways and byways of Arizona, there is not a single saguaro to be seen either. It does remain an interesting glimpse into one of the most violent episodes in the state’s recent history. However, I was left feeling I’d get as much insight by reading a Wikipedia article.