The Hitcher reviewed by Sam Osborn
The title sequence for The Hitcher involves a jackrabbit. Not a real jackrabbit, naturally, but one rendered entirely from CGI wizardry. The creature hops twice, wiggles his nose, ruffles unconvincingly with the live-action weeds around him, and ventures out onto the nearby highway to be smeared across the pavement by a snarling motorist trailing the title slide behind him. This, the opening sequence means to say, is The Hitcher: a smudge of road kill wiped messily across the asphalt. And in the realm of promising opening sequences, this ranks near the worst. Equally cringe-inducing is the succeeding cut, where the open road is swapped for the sunny college campus, with a grinning bulk of meticulously unshaven man waving to his toned and thinned brunette prancing towards him on their way to a riotous spring break. What, we may ask, have we gotten ourselves into?
Actually, we've snuggled into a delightfully sordid affair. Despite its two misguided introductions, what follows is an intensely satisfying creep through the shady-eyed terror felt by all when stopping on the highway for a crooked thumb hitching a ride.
The aforementioned waving hunk of man is Zachary Knighton playing Jim Halsey, an everyday California college boy with a perky girlfriend, this time played by "One Tree Hill" veteran Sophia Bush. The two are more intelligent than other Slasher-film fodder, but still fall victim to a script rigged to pose manipulative lapses in judgment. Why, if those that are trying to protect you wish to put you into custody, would you run from them and wiggle into a shadowy trailer park hiding place with a psychopathic gunman close on your trail? These are questions one must obviously suspend when viewing a Slasher film, I suppose; and compared to the boys and girls of the Scream franchise and I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jim and Grace are regular valedictorians.
Anyway, the two are burning the midnight oil down a New Mexico highway, joking mirthfully at a comfortably rainy sixty mph when a black figure with a pointing thumb suddenly looms in the middle of the road. Skidding through a full rotation, Jim and Grace decide not to meddle with fate and drive off, leaving the uninjured man to find another ride. At the next gas station, however, the hitcher (Sean Bean) appears again, having picked up a ride soon after Jim and Grace departed. Posing as a wet, harmless housecat, the hitcher asks for a ride and Jim breaks down, offering to take him to the next hotel fifteen miles away. Midway through the ride, though, the hitcherwho calls himself John Ryderholds a knife to Grace's eye and demands that Jim chant the words "I Want to Die." Jim manages his first feat of collegiate-sport heroics in response and promptly ejects John from the speeding vehicle. John is no pesky fly on the wall, however, and no man built for defeat. The hunt has only just begun, apparently, and Mr. Ryder torments the young couple and all who stand in his way for the ensuing seventy minutes.
Reminding us sometimes of the aptly titled French horror picture, High Tension, Director Dave Meyers succeeds in holding the tension extremely taut by doing very little. What's more frustrating than a scene of tight-shouldered suspense without the requisite release? It leaves us holding our breath and with no cathartic jump scare for the tension to exhale into. The screenplay does well to mount situations, however murky the logic behind them is, that work to create horrific triangles of suspense. Granted, most of the screams come from blind lunges from dark corners, the undeserving jump scare is sometimes a welcome relief to the dead silence of suspense. Meyers also steers clear (mostly) of the bloodbath antics of the Hostel and Saw franchises, only resorting to excessive gore when necessary (maybe this is a byproduct of a noticeably shabby make-up department though). His scares might not be completely genuine or entirely affective, but they work well enough to forward the story yarn towards the two momentous climaxes. Here, in a sort of symphonic car chase double sequence, Meyers' music video background gleams through. Following up on an extraordinarily appropriate line-up of songs, an iconic, industrial techno diddy pulsates through the soundscape. Cars launch and catapult in an oblivion worthy of Michael Bay destruction, with precisely chosen perspectives and split-second filmic reactions that only an old hand of the music video industry could intuit. The scene is a kind of operatic smackdown of vehicular menace, and one that leaves us in awe of our lunatic baddie.
With a limited number of lines given to John Ryder and the limited IQ dished out to the couple, The Hitcher obviously isn't attempting an innovation to the Slasher genre. But with Sean Bean doing his best lurking criminal pose as Mr. Ryder, and Sophia Bush proving that her acting is more substantial than her scarily small weight, The Hitcher is a good and satisfying execution of the genre motions.
Sam Osborn
The title sequence for The Hitcher involves a jackrabbit. Not a real jackrabbit, naturally, but one rendered entirely from CGI wizardry. The creature hops twice, wiggles his nose, ruffles unconvincingly with the live-action weeds around him, and ventures out onto the nearby highway to be smeared across the pavement by a snarling motorist trailing the title slide behind him. This, the opening sequence means to say, is The Hitcher: a smudge of road kill wiped messily across the asphalt. And in the realm of promising opening sequences, this ranks near the worst. Equally cringe-inducing is the succeeding cut, where the open road is swapped for the sunny college campus, with a grinning bulk of meticulously unshaven man waving to his toned and thinned brunette prancing towards him on their way to a riotous spring break. What, we may ask, have we gotten ourselves into?
Actually, we've snuggled into a delightfully sordid affair. Despite its two misguided introductions, what follows is an intensely satisfying creep through the shady-eyed terror felt by all when stopping on the highway for a crooked thumb hitching a ride.
The aforementioned waving hunk of man is Zachary Knighton playing Jim Halsey, an everyday California college boy with a perky girlfriend, this time played by "One Tree Hill" veteran Sophia Bush. The two are more intelligent than other Slasher-film fodder, but still fall victim to a script rigged to pose manipulative lapses in judgment. Why, if those that are trying to protect you wish to put you into custody, would you run from them and wiggle into a shadowy trailer park hiding place with a psychopathic gunman close on your trail? These are questions one must obviously suspend when viewing a Slasher film, I suppose; and compared to the boys and girls of the Scream franchise and I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jim and Grace are regular valedictorians.
Anyway, the two are burning the midnight oil down a New Mexico highway, joking mirthfully at a comfortably rainy sixty mph when a black figure with a pointing thumb suddenly looms in the middle of the road. Skidding through a full rotation, Jim and Grace decide not to meddle with fate and drive off, leaving the uninjured man to find another ride. At the next gas station, however, the hitcher (Sean Bean) appears again, having picked up a ride soon after Jim and Grace departed. Posing as a wet, harmless housecat, the hitcher asks for a ride and Jim breaks down, offering to take him to the next hotel fifteen miles away. Midway through the ride, though, the hitcherwho calls himself John Ryderholds a knife to Grace's eye and demands that Jim chant the words "I Want to Die." Jim manages his first feat of collegiate-sport heroics in response and promptly ejects John from the speeding vehicle. John is no pesky fly on the wall, however, and no man built for defeat. The hunt has only just begun, apparently, and Mr. Ryder torments the young couple and all who stand in his way for the ensuing seventy minutes.
Reminding us sometimes of the aptly titled French horror picture, High Tension, Director Dave Meyers succeeds in holding the tension extremely taut by doing very little. What's more frustrating than a scene of tight-shouldered suspense without the requisite release? It leaves us holding our breath and with no cathartic jump scare for the tension to exhale into. The screenplay does well to mount situations, however murky the logic behind them is, that work to create horrific triangles of suspense. Granted, most of the screams come from blind lunges from dark corners, the undeserving jump scare is sometimes a welcome relief to the dead silence of suspense. Meyers also steers clear (mostly) of the bloodbath antics of the Hostel and Saw franchises, only resorting to excessive gore when necessary (maybe this is a byproduct of a noticeably shabby make-up department though). His scares might not be completely genuine or entirely affective, but they work well enough to forward the story yarn towards the two momentous climaxes. Here, in a sort of symphonic car chase double sequence, Meyers' music video background gleams through. Following up on an extraordinarily appropriate line-up of songs, an iconic, industrial techno diddy pulsates through the soundscape. Cars launch and catapult in an oblivion worthy of Michael Bay destruction, with precisely chosen perspectives and split-second filmic reactions that only an old hand of the music video industry could intuit. The scene is a kind of operatic smackdown of vehicular menace, and one that leaves us in awe of our lunatic baddie.
With a limited number of lines given to John Ryder and the limited IQ dished out to the couple, The Hitcher obviously isn't attempting an innovation to the Slasher genre. But with Sean Bean doing his best lurking criminal pose as Mr. Ryder, and Sophia Bush proving that her acting is more substantial than her scarily small weight, The Hitcher is a good and satisfying execution of the genre motions.
Sam Osborn