Worth: $8.28
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Billy Bob Thornton, Hopper Penn, Robin Wright, Emma Booth
Intro:
… between the unfortunately mismatched casting, the rote dialogue, and overall unimpressive storytelling, there’s not much to recommend here.
Back in July, when this film was screened at the opening night of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Western Australian director Ben Young (Hounds Of Love, Extinction) admitted to the production troubles that befell Devil’s Peak. Attached for five years without much word, Young got two weeks’ notice to start production in Georgia, and had to cut half of the runtime to meet producer (be sure to check out how many producers are credited on the film) demands. It was an unfortunate snapshot of the way that Hollywood can treat young filmmakers, and it goes quite a way to explain why Devil’s Peak turned out as compromised as it did.
The performances aren’t great. Billy Bob Thornton as the menacing meth dealer Charlie gets decent monologues to chew his way through, but he never manages to close the gap between the informed menace of his character as told by the script (and David Joy’s source novel Where All Light Tends to Go), and how he actually comes across on-screen. Where this gets odd is that there are a few parallels between his character and that of John (Stephen Curry) in Hounds Of Love, right down to his on-screen relationship with a returning Emma Booth (albeit sporting an atrocious Southern accent).
But that’s nothing compared to the much bigger problem that is Hopper Penn in the lead role as Jacob, Charlie’s son. His character arc, wrestling between the toxicity of his father and the virtue of his mother Virgie (played by his actual mother Robin Wright), is the core of the narrative, but Penn is unable to portray it in anything other than the most passive terms. He exists as someone to be influenced by others, a cypher, rather than as his own person. The film opens with him stripped down to his tighty-whiteys, brandishing a rifle, yet the story to follow never gets anywhere near that revealing with his character.
It doesn’t help that, as much as Michael McDermott’s handheld camerawork and Adam Spark’s atmospheric soundtrack try to give it a boost, the story is bland. As a depiction of the seedy underbelly of the Appalachian region, it fails to meet the bone-scraping bleakness of The Devil All the Time, or even the deceptive revulsion of Hillbilly Elegy. It carries some of the parental anxieties present in Young’s previous work, repackaged as a been-there-done-that quasi-Western yarn about the breaking point of an innocent soul.
Devil’s Peak is a flat Southern-fried crime thriller. Credit to Ben Young for soldiering through, given the circumstances, and the production values are decent enough, but between the unfortunately mismatched casting, the rote dialogue, and overall unimpressive storytelling, there’s not much to recommend here.
