CLEAR CUT - Mark Reviews Movies

Clear Cut, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

Once it's revealed what's happening in Clear Cut, the title feels appropriate. Until that late point in the movie, it comes across as a joke at our expense.

There's little that's clear about the narrative of Joe Perruccio's screenplay, which begins with a woman being hunted in the woods by a man with a crossbow, introduces a pair of loggers who seemingly stumble upon a drug deal, and quickly becomes a game of cat-and-mouse in the forest. Yes, it's simple stuff, but the attempt to surprise us with the back story of this plot makes a wholly simplistic affair into one that looks incompetently haphazard.

Our hero is Jack (Clive Standen), who's on his first job cutting down trees in the woods of Oregon with a longtime veteran of the gig. That man is played by Alec Baldwin, who probably took the role for a paycheck and knowing that even the people who see this lousy thriller will immediately forget he was in it.

The basic setup has the greenhorn spotting some smoke in the distance while he's on his lunch break, going toward it, and finding a group of people in the middle of a drug deal. He also finds the body of the woman from the prologue in the back of a pickup truck, but oddly, Jack's instinct it to grab the bag of money while the goons aren't looking and run back to his boss to show him the cash. Before the two can figure out what to do about the situation, the criminals arrive and attack the pair.

What's fascinating about this introduction isn't that it makes little to no sense. If we take what we see as a given, what is Jack's plan here? If he's trying to stop and report the drug dealers, why doesn't he ignore the cash or, perhaps, lead his conversation with his boss with the fact that there are some killers nearby? If the guy is trying to steal the money, why would he bother returning to the Baldwin character at all or, if he were to do so, telling the logging vet about the cash's existence in the first place?

The only saving grace here is that the criminals show up too quickly for us to really consider these questions, but then, there's the bigger issue with the movie. Once Perruccio and director Brian Skiba actually explain why Jack is in the woods and what he's attempting to do here, the real fascination is that the setup makes even less sense.

There's a real feeling that the screenplay began with one idea in mind and suddenly shifted in the writing process. There is a mystery at the core of the story, which has to do with Jack's past and his apparent connection to the drug dealers and his intimate knowledge of what they're specifically planning, who else is involved, and what they're willing to do if anyone gets in their way. The narrative's structure, which interrupts the chase and the fights for flashbacks that gradually piece together the truth of that puzzle, isn't nearly clever enough to distract us from how unnecessarily convoluted both it and Jack's plan really are.

The plotting itself isn't much better. Basically, Jack keeps running and hiding from the criminals, led by Eli (Jesse Metcalfe), as if his main goal is to escape from the forest alive and with the money in hand. It's difficult to determine which is more amusing: that the drug dealers are able to repeatedly find him without much effort or that they seem to stop for lengthy breathers so that Jack can recall and dream about his life before the chase begins. That one of Skiba's awkward transitions includes an immediate cut to Jack in gratuitous, mid-coital intimacy with his current, ex, or on-the-rocks wife (played by Lucy Martin) kind of gets at the heart of the movie's dependence on its baser instincts.

That includes a lot of violence, of course, most of it arriving from unconvincing fights and an understanding of how fire works that seems the result of watching far too many bad movies. A truck spontaneously bursts into flames after hitting a tree, for example, while another car simply explodes from a single gunshot. Even if the digital flame effects are cheap (which they are), it doesn't negate the strange cruelty of one of our protagonist's "heroic" moments coming from burning an incapacitated man alive, especially after the movie tries to elicit horror from a previous instance of that.

Everything about Jack, his past, and his true motive is eventually revealed in Clear Cut. Ignoring how ridiculous much of the action is here, the silliest thing is how a story so basic can make so little sense.

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