Rating: B
Dir: Francis Galluppi
Star: Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake, Michael Abbott Jr.
For a feature debut, this is rather assured, and packs a great deal of entertainment value. I was originally going to write “fun”; that’s not quite accurate, because the pleasures here are mostly shaking your head sadly as things go from bad to worse. Galluppi may have invented a new sub-genre here: the cringe thriller. It sites somewhere between a heist and a siege, supposedly taking place at the titular roadside establishment on the way from Arizona to California. Except, they’re out of gas, so until the tanker arrives, nobody who needs fuel is going anywhere. What the audience knows, and the characters don’t, is that won’t be happening, the truck having crashed off the road.
First to get stuck is an unnamed knife salesman (Cummings), on his way to Carlsbad for his daughter’s birthday. He hangs out with the waitress, Charlotte (Donahue), who’s married to the local Sheriff, Charlie (Abbott). Unfortunately, next to arrive are two criminals, the experienced Beau (Brake) and hot-headed sibling Travis, hightailing it for the border after robbing a bank in Buckeye. The salesman recognizes the car from a radio bulletin, but is exposed before Charlotte can alert her husband. It then becomes more like a siege situation, as the brothers wait for someone – anyone – to show up with the much-needed gas which will let them continue. Only, this is Arizona and that means a lot of customers will be packing firearms. It won’t end well.
This has drawn comparisons to both Tarantino and the Coens; the latter seems closer to me, Galluppi not suffering from the same chronic verbal diarrhoea as QT. Actions here generally speak louder than words. It does possess the same sense of people caught up in criminal activities far beyond their capacity, and I note one customer is played by Gene Jones, who had a small, memorable role in No Country, as a gas station owner who meets Anton Chigurh. [Brake, meanwhile, was the Night King in Game of Thrones. No clue if that’s significant] All the people here are well-crafted, to the degree almost everyone feels like they could anchor their own feature. At one point, it does feel overloaded with characters: the film quickly takes care of that, shall we say…
A minor demerit for faking Arizona, and filming at the Four Aces Movie Ranch, in Palmdale, California. Though, hey, I probably wouldn’t want to spend much time in the real Yuma either. It’s set in the seventies, though not for much obvious purpose beyond avoiding the pesky cellphone issue. It does make good use of some period tunes, particularly Roy Orbison’s Crying in a counter-programming way which is excellent. Despite Galluppi’s lack of experience, this is an engrossing thriller, whose twists and turns work considerably more often than they misfire. I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes from here. Hopefully, it will involve him finding his own voice, rather than a highly-effective pastiche of others’ work.