Low-budget crime drama with higher-than-usual character interest. Most of that interest centers around a small-town Arkansas sheriff (Bill Paxton) who happens to police the suspected destination of three murderous fugitives from Los Angeles, a dapper and cool-headed black, a scruffy, ponytailed, psychopathic white, and the latter's coke-addicted, café-au-lait girlfriend. The good-old-boy sheriff, a solid family man, a breezily benign racist, a diplomatic peacekeeper who has not had to draw his pistol in six years in office, receives the mixed-race tandem of big-city homicide cops with all the enthusiasm normally reserved for Hollywood celebrities. ("Dale doesn't know any better," elucidates his wife. "He watches TV. I read nonfiction.") Along the way his ego gets bruised; a deep dark secret about him comes out, not a terribly surprising secret but a sobering and complicating one; and the climax is didactically, chasteningly, and a wee bit predictably, true to life. The director, Carl Franklin, gets a little overexcited in the homestretch, with omniscient cross-cutting and tilted camera angles that add up to a sort of visual drumroll (kettledrum, not snare). Before that he contains himself admirably. Or maybe it's the low budget that contains him. Cynda Williams, Billy Bob Thornton, Jim Metzler. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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