RED ROCK WEST
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1992) **1/2 (out of four)
The only gimmick this movie has going for it is that it has more twists and turns than the Coney Island Cyclone. In RED ROCK WEST, the movie never moves in one direction for long, and you discover something new about each of the characters every few minutes that puts a complete spin on everything. It's musical chairs without the one person having to sit out after every round. No, everybody participates in everything here, and there are plot twists on a basis regular enough you could set your watch to it.
At the beginning of the movie, Nicholas Cage, having just driven more than a thousand miles for a job he was immediately fired from, walks into a bar and is immediately offered a job by the owner (J.T. Walsh), who mistakes him for someone else. Cage expects some kind of busboy or bartender position but instead becomes Head Hitman as the owner gives him five thousand in cash and a gun, with instructions to kill his wife. Cage doesn't feel himself in a position to refuse, but soon finds himself warning the wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) of what's coming. The wife immediately turns around and gives him ten thousand to kill her husband.
Cage soon comes to the conclusion that he is better off taking the money and running, but on his way out of town, he hits a pedestrain and has to turn around and take the guy to the hospital. (He may accept money for killing people, but that doesn't make him any less humanitarian.) At the hospital, he meets the town sheriff, who also owns the town bar. The sheriff is understandibly mad that his hitman was about to skip town, and takes him out to the woods, where he tries to hunt Cage down. But Cage makes it to a nearby road, where he is picked up by a visiting cowboy (Dennis Hopper), who is driving into town on business.
The cowboy learns he and Cage are both ex-Marines and insists on buying a Cage a drink. So where do they go? J.T.'s bar, of course, where Hopper tells the bartender he needs to see the owner about a job he's late for. Cage puts one and one together and realizes Hopper is the hitman, which is about the same time J.T. walks in. It may seem like I've given the movie's entire plot away, but this all happens in the first twenty minutes. The back of the video box tells that much.
RED ROCK WEST keeps the same pace for the next eighty minutes, through countless other twists and surprising character revelations, until it all ends in a graveyard where half a million dollars is buried. This is a decent action thriller, but it takes on a camp value with the overacting and unrelenting plot twists. You can't take the movie seriously for a second even though it seems like it wants to be. And after about an hour of endless manipulation on behalf of the writers, it gets completely tiresome.
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