[yasr_overall_rating]
A teen traveling with her mother to a treatment center for her agoraphobia has to fight for their lives against a gunman who attacks them.
In “Big Sky,” the script takes what could have been a complex look at agoraphobia and oversimplifies it, distilling it into just a plain old average thriller. And I mean average. Hazel (Disney alum Bella Thorne) travels to a therapy center in the desert, accompanied by her mother, Dee (Kyra Sedgwick, one degree from Kevin Bacon in case you were wondering), and a few other folks in need of a “break.” Hazel’s condition cripples her to the point she has to be encased in a small compartment under the luggage at the back of the van so she doesn’t have to see the outside world at any time during the trip. So, the van, filled with four patients, Hazel’s mom, and flirtatious driver Lyle (Michael Sheets), heads onto the open road and toward their desert oasis. Somehow, they end up on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere, and in deep trouble. Along come two brothers, the younger entirely too trigger happy, who attack the van and kidnap one its passengers. Dee, who sat in front next to the driver suffers both a head injury and a gunshot wound. As the only passenger spared, Hazel must beat her illness and go across barren Oklahoma territory to find help. She grabs her medicine, which seems like a good idea at first, wraps her head in a cloth and takes her baby steps across the sandy ground.
With the film chocked full of able actors acting ably, no one really stands out here. Naturally, director Jorge Michel Grau focuses much of his attention on Hazel. Thorne does what she can with material, but she mostly shuffles through the sand while repeating instructions to herself in a quiet voice, then takes meds. I understand this behavior keeps consistency intact, but it makes for slowly moving cinema. Grau spends so much time on her solitary journey the film bogs down for a good portion, just as Hazel does. She has her bottle full of medicine, so you can imagine what happens to the meds by the time she gets too far into her walk. Thorne does nothing to stretch the character here. I might have actually been more entertained to see some shameless overacting out of her. Instead, she becomes almost robotic for much of the film. She showed more spark in her few moments as the stereotypical mean girl in “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”
The same could be said for the rest of the cast. Sedgwick’s Dee gets an undue amount of screen time for such a thinly written character. She starts out playing an updated version of her man-hunting mother Mae from “Second Hand Lions” then sits into the front seat of a van and can do only two things: flirt and wail in pain. Our bad guys play things pretty straightforward as brothers Jesse (Frank Grillo) and Pru (Aaron Tveit). Jesse’s the protective older brother, protecting his younger brother from himself and other people from his younger brother. While he doesn’t see himself as a bad person, he recognizes his brother’s tendency toward psychopathy. Everyone here, from the van driver to the out of control (a little) Pru delivers serviceable performances, doing nothing to elevate “Big Sky.”
Okay, I’ll give some credit to the creepiest guy in the story. French Canadian actor Franҫois Arnaud gives easily the most interesting performance as the Aldous Huxley quoting, off kilter drifter Clete. His few moments on screen brighten the dull action as he promises Hazel the help she needs. Of course, he’s not what he seems; or maybe he is, and she’s just too doped up to notice. Either way, Arnaud injects some life into a lifeless film.
Evan M. Weiner’s script handcuffs everyone associated with the production. It contains elements that probably seemed ethereal and deep when he wrote them. They simply didn’t translate onto film. A stronger director than Grau would have ordered a complete re-write, instead of boring his audience to death trying to take a simple thriller and turn it into a good art house film. Without giving too much away, Weiner wastes too much heft by having a female lead character who’s essentially defenseless. He gets away with it by distracting his antagonists, but to what real purpose? I felt no tension until the final ten minutes, even though he had plenty of opportunity to bring tension into the plot if he could have just kept from focusing so much time on Bella Thorne shuffling through the desert.
Really, the greatest blame falls on Grau. He had the control or should have taken it and made better use of the resources at hand. His location seemed better suited for “Mad Max,” but only because he never really makes use of the landscape in his framing. Great cinematography enhances and encompasses a story. Here, the landscape simply served as a stage with a spare amount of props. While the storyline moves in a linear direction from beginning to end, Grau doesn’t add the little touches and details to raise the suspense. There are no distracting subplots to make things more interesting, and no real guess work as to the outcome until the last little bit of the movie.
“Big Sky” ended up being a big disappointment, largely due to the missed opportunities its director failed to see. While the violence can be jarring and the final ten minutes woke me up enough to pay attention, it’s a movie whose worst crime is the trail of wasted talent it leaves in its wake.
In select theaters and on VOD now
