A wronged-woman thriller in which the flattery of the heroine reaches such nauseating heights as to call into question its sincerity. (The once-in-a-million-lifetimes event of driving an automobile off a moving ferry into the bay, while one hand is cuffed to the door handle and the other is fending off an armed lawman, is only one obstacle, and quite early in the carelessly plotted course, for our indefatigable heroine.) Ashley Judd doesn't offer a coherent characterization so much as a full-range thespian portfolio, holding nothing in reserve, showing off her complete line of wares. She undeniably has a striking speaking voice, warm, drawly, low, and vibrant. But no one is more aware of this than she is, and at times she seems content to fiddle away on her vocal cords as if performing musical scales. No emotion of the moment can crowd out the all-encompassing feeling of self-indulgence. The Australian-born Bruce Beresford, a go-with-the-flow filmmaker who has packed up any personal interests in exchange for a Hollywood career (the time for Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy is past), demonstrates his disengagement on the road to revenge by stopping to luxuriate in Travel & Leisure views of the Pacific Northwest, the Colorado Rockies, and finally New Orleans. You can at least be grateful that Tommy Lee Jones, as a hard-drinking parole officer hot on the heroine's heels, is not literally playing Lt. Gerard, though you would think nonetheless that after The Fugitive and its spinoff, U.S. Marshals, Jones would have wanted to let a couple of decades go by before he again took off in relentless pursuit of an innocent party. Bruce Greenwood, Annabeth Gish. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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