Year:  2017

Director:  Jamie M. Bagg

Rated:  MA15+

Release:  November 30, 2017

Distributor: Icon

Running time: 95 minutes

Worth: $11.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Jon Bernthal, Christopher Abbott, Imogen Poots, Rosemarie DeWitt, Odessa Young

Intro:
If you need a strong narrative engine, look elsewhere. 

Former rodeo star Sam (Jon Bernthal) has a raft of problems, not the least of which is the debilitating injury that robbed him of arena stardom and left him spending his days as the manager of a rundown motel in a small Alaskan town. However, his life gets more complicated when he befriends one of his temporary tenants, Elwood (Christopher Abbott), who happens to be the hitman that local girl Lila (Imogen Poots) hired to whack her useless husband. Unfortunately for a great number of people, Elwood doesn’t fit the “ice cold killer” archetype; he’s got a hair-trigger temper and a horrifying capacity for violence, which is going to come into play sooner or later.

Small town noir is the genre in play here, but while all the pieces are present and correct, director Jamie M. Dagg and writers Paul and Benjamin China don’t know how to mix them together in a way that’s interesting or profound. Simply, we’ve seen this before, and done much better to boot. The pacing is leaden, the cinematography frequently murky enough to make parsing the action difficult, and while the cast is great across the board, they’re not given much to do.

Still, Sweet Virginia isn’t a terrible film, just a very generic one. Jon Bernthal, who’s cropping up all over the place these days, remains a completely arresting screen presence, and support comes from the likes of Rosemarie DeWitt and Australian Odessa Young (The Daughter) in small roles. If performance is more important than plot to you, this is worth a look. If you need a strong narrative engine, though, look elsewhere.

Click here for nationwide movie times for Sweet Virginia

 

 

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