Overfamiliar story of dad wreaking vengeance on the baddies who have despoiled his ‘little girl’ is not helped by ponderous action and risible dialogue
Jake Hunter (played by Paul Sloan, and yes, that really is the character’s name) has at one point been a soldier who did some kind of black ops work so secret he could never even tell his own daughter Melissa (Claire Kniaz) what it was exactly. While he’s away black-opping and she’s meant to be kicking a drug habit under the supervision of a friend of his (Michael Madsen), she goes missing near the desert
California town Salton Sea, and Hunter puts his skills to use in an effort to find out what happened. Turns out, wouldn’t you know it, she got mixed up with some shady people through her skeevy boyfriend Bobby (Hudson Garland) who is the son of local big shot Nichols (Jake Weber), a man who is trying to go more legit by getting involved with the water industry instead of just running, say, strip bars – which is where Hunter first meets Bobby and his dad.
Sigh. How many times do we have to do this? Does the world really need another film about some swaggering patriarch searching for, and avenging the death of, “his little girl”? The grandpappy progenitor of the form is arguably Paul Schrader’s now dated but still deeply discomforting Hardcore from 1979 which starred George C Scott. But the many and sundry knockoffs and remakes (see Joel Schumacher’s 8mm) too often rely on a reductive sort of morality wherein we’re meant to be horrified at the idea of one young lady’s innocence being despoiled but are still meant to leer at the images of other
Women in the sex trade who are encountered, usually barely dressed, along the way. Sure enough, that’s exactly what’s going on here when Hunter first meets the baddies at a pole dancing establishment. It’s all a bit icky really.