Entertaining but emotionally stunted film about a family hunting trip starts out with promising menace but gets bogged down in a thicket of dialogue
“Why do we kill?” “It’s what we do.” That’s the flinty Old Testament register on offer in this backwoods thriller, in which brusque Texan dad Tom (Tom Zembrod) takes his autistic son Donnie (Dash Melrose) out on a hunting trip to get over his mother’s fatal overdose. Also along for the ride is Donnie’s simpering uncle Frank (Paul T Taylor), who is unconvinced by his brother-in-law’s man-up modus operandi. They all have to deal with Tom’s blowhard routine – lecturing Donnie about the perils of bush snakes and refusing to let anyone wear hi-vis – until they stumble on a man bleeding from a stomach wound with a backpack full of banknotes.
Whitetail – a nature-reveals-not-heals kind of film in the Deliverance vein – starts out with promising menace; the camera loping around the car from which the stranger has absconded, as the indicator blinks incessantly. But after a tidy opening sketching out Tom’s overbearing personality, it soon gets bogged down in interminable scenes – both with the family trio as they squabble over whether to help the man, and at a cabin where another criminal looking to recover the loot holds the local landowner hostage – that verge on double-denim self-parody: “I worked, Frank. That’s what a man does in this world.” With a thicket of dialogue substituting for actual drama, long stretches are less slow-burn than no-burn.