Mark Reviews Movies: MIDNIGHT IN THE SWITCHGRASS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2021

Alan Horsnail's screenplay for Midnight in the Switchgrass establishes a couple of intriguing protagonists, a potentially creepy and paradoxical villain, and the foundation for a race-against-the-clock the thriller. With all of that set up, the movie doesn't need to do too much to pull of the genre basics and at least appear competent. Somehow, though, Horsnail and director Randall Emmett fail at both the basics and displaying a minimal level of competency.

The premise is your standard hunt for a serial killer. Two law enforcement officials—a state cop and an agent with the FBI—find their respective investigations crossing, so they team up to investigate and pursue a particularly brutal murderer of women. Meanwhile, the killer goes about his cruel business, while seeming like a perfectly ordinary guy when he isn't abducting and strangling runaways and sex workers.

There is, of course, nothing new to any of this, but the opening section of this movie almost fools us into believing there might be something beneath its formulaic surface. We meet, for example, Rebecca (Megan Fox), the FBI agent with an apparent vendetta against men who would abuse or otherwise harm women.

She's undercover for a sting operation with her partner Karl (Bruce Willis, in a role that's essentially an extended cameo, which, thankfully, doesn't try to make character more important than he is on account of the casting—unlike Willis' near-top billing here). Disguised as a sex worker and hoping to arrest a man she has been tracking online for some time, Rebecca is surprised and quickly disgusted by an unexpected visitor, who scared away the guy the investigation had been targeting. When the visitor becomes rough, the agent beats him with impunity and no small amount of satisfaction.

The other protagonist is Byron (Emile Hirsch), a detective with the Florida state police, who believes that a serial killer has been operating under everyone's noses for months or longer. We get the usual scenes of the determined cop invading crime scenes that aren't his prerogative and being chewed out by his commander for overstepping.

We also, though, get a real sense of Byron as a weary and even melancholy man, who once was certain that he was doing good in this world by bringing particularly ruthless criminals to justice, but now finds himself questioning his job, his accomplishments, and his faith. All of this is in the script, related a bit heavily in dialogue scenes at home, but Hirsch and his sorrowful eyes bring some genuine weight to the character.

As for the killer, he's a truck driver named Peter (Lukas Haas), who has been kidnapping runaways and murdering sex workers for some time now. He also has a seemingly normal and happy family life—a caring husband and a doting father.

All of this is a fine, if mostly predictable, start to a thriller. That's why it's so confounding how quickly and severely the whole affair goes off the rails.

Basically, the story has no real focal point, which works well enough as Horsnail establishes the characters and the central conflict. As Rebecca and Byron team up to hunt down Peter, though, the story loses its focus on these characters, relies a bit too heavily on unnecessarily convoluted setpieces (The two cops, for example, stake out a bar, hoping their suspect will show up and, for some reason, give himself away), and proceeds to make a number of tension-derailing storytelling and editing choices, just as the hunt should be escalating.

It becomes clear, as Rebecca inches closer to becoming a potential victim in Peter's sick game and as Byron tries to put a stop to that, that both the screenwriter and the director have put themselves in a narrative corner. As such, Byron spends an inordinate amount of time delaying his search for Rebecca—gathering himself, having a domestic debate about how work has taken priority over his home life, going through memories of events that have little to no bearing on the investigation at hand (There's a montage of flashbacks to every interaction the cop has had with Rebecca, as if he needs the push to find her, and interrupting the race to save the fed, another montage shows all of Peter's killings). A trapped Rebecca, meanwhile, endures some torture, before a pretty unconvincing cat-and-mouse chase unfolds.

On a fundamental level, Midnight in the Switchgrass doesn't work. As intriguing as these characters seem at the start, they're mostly unnecessary as the plotting takes over, and that plotting is nothing but formulaic, predictable, inconsistent, and self-defeating.

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