Inevitable after John Dahl's The Last Seduction. He co-wrote/directed this Western noir with his brother Rick.
Righteous Nicolas Cage escapes from something somewhere with expectations of a job on an oil rig in Wyoming. The opening scene has him getting tidied up on the side of a dusty road, shaving with what I took to be water from the radiator of his Texas-plated yank tank. A dodgy leg (a result of the Beirut bombings) costs him that opportunity but of course there's a more interesting one going at the bar in Red Rock run by J.T. Walsh. This leads him to an encounter with Lara Flynn Boyle and soon enough Dennis Hopper. The plot twists are fun as is the odd bit of dialogue and repeated genre tropes.
Some scenes are a bit clunky, making me think that either the main players were miscast — Flynn Boyle needed to be unrelentingly foxy and more subtly calculating, and Hopper less psycho, more dead eyed — or that the director lacked sufficient control over them. It doesn't pay to overthink the scenario.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. The themes are David Lynch's, the entirety like the Coen's Blood Simple. Caryn James. Cage channelled some of that Wild at Heart Elvis and added some bemusement.
