Cold in July (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆

Cold in July (2014) – J. Mickle

I saw this on a list of recent “neo-noirs” and checked it out, despite the DVD box looking (and advertising) like a 90s Tarantino rip-off.  So, I went in cold, as it were, barely knowing who Michael C. Hall is (wondering half the time whether he had once been in The Breakfast Club).  He plays a not particularly bright picture framer who kills a prowler in self-defence and then has to deal with the prowler’s just-out-of-jail father (played menacingly by Sam Shepard).  A good deal of tension is created just out of this situation, as Shepard stalks Hall and his family.  But soon the police move in and the threat is removed…until Hall realises that all is not as it seems.  Soon, he’s partnering with Shepard and private eye/pig farmer Don Johnson to take the law into their own hands.  Things get very dark, so much so that I would say that the film crosses the line into tawdry (sordid and unpleasant) and risks invoking some bad shit without enough heft to the plot to justify it.  That is, the subsequent pay-off to the film and the exploration of the characters just seems to go flat at the end with no attempt to investigate their psychology or a more literary theme about fathers and sons that falls away just out of reach.  It isn’t a complete write-off: the tension remains high throughout and the inevitable ultra-violence is well-staged (for that sort of thing) plus the film takes place in the ‘80s with period detail to match (I gave a little shudder).  But my recommendation is to give this a miss.