Hickoryburger On the surface this movie is a thriller. Kurt Russell is the everyman Jeff Taylor. Kathleen Quinlan plays his wife Amy and she has little screen time. J.T. Walsh, as always, shines in his role as the bad bad man. The story plays out how you anticipate it will and it has a lot of fun along the way. This movie is also an allegory for how poor decision making and losing sight of what's important can jeopardize one's marriage. Consider the fact that in the beginning of the film Jeff and Amy are reflecting on their journey from Massachusetts to San Diego, their financial difficulties, and their regret that they spent so much money on their car, a loaded SUV. Due to Jeff's inattentiveness a series of unfortunate events unfolds. At the critical juncture in the film, when their car breaks down and they are offered a ride, Jeff decides to stay with the car while his wife gets in the truck with the samaritan. The rest of the movie follows Jeff as he fights like hell to save his wife and his marriage. Along the way, he loses the car and all his money but rediscovers what's really important. The moral? Keep your eyes on the road and stick by your wife :)

FlashCallahan Jeff and Amy Taylor are moving to California and drive across the country. When they find themselves stranded in the middle of the desert with barely anyone or anything around, their trip comes to a halt. Amy takes a ride with a friendly trucker to a small diner to call for help, but as time goes by, Jeff becomes worried. He finds that no one in the diner has seen or heard from his wife. When he finds the trucker who gave Amy the ride, the trucker denies having ever seen her. Now Jeff must attempt to find his wife, who has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. But who can he trust.......If you can ignore the final ten minutes of this movie, which gives us an obligatory over the top action scene, this is a solid, if nuts n' bolts thriller.Russell plays the middle class Everyman who winds the locals up the wrong way on first viewing, but on second viewing, it's a plausible set up to take advantage of 'city people' taking an unknown route to reach their destination.He's a great choice for the Everyman, calm and collected at first, then bewildered and so on. It's as if we actually see him going through the stages of grief in such a short time, and he plays his character wonderfully. In fact, it's his greatest performance of the nineties.But as good as he is, it's Walsh who steals the film. The scene where he literally denies having seen Amy, when no one else is around them is truly menacing, and just shows how unhinged him and his cohorts are.But as my knowledge and cinematic intellect has changed dramatically in the eighteen years since this release, I've realised that its nothing more than a high concept straight to DVD movie that gained theatrical release because of its star power.If it were released today, it would star Cusack and Cage, and go straight to DVD and vanish without a trace. But in the late nineties, these Hitchcockian-lite thrillers were quite popular, so I can understand its success.So all in all, it's pretty well done for the first hour, the scenery is beautiful, but it loses its mojo and goes unnecessarily action packed for the finale.

Python Hyena Breakdown (1997): Dir: Jonathan Mostow / Cast: Kurt Russell, Kathleen Quinlan, J.T. Walsh, M.C. Gainey, Jack Noseworthy: Chilling film that echos The Vanishing only this film has the added advantage of being a much better film. The title is physically referring to the condition of a vehicle as well as the breakdown of mind and emotion. Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan are vacationing when their vehicle breaks down. Quinlan accepts a ride from a trucker while Russell awaits a tow truck. When she is not at a given destination, Russell and a cop stop the truck but the trucker claims that he has never seen them before. Uncertainty lies at its very core as viewers are not sure what Russell will find. Director Jonathan Mostow provides tension although the conclusion falters with justified violence just to satisfy a hunger that perhaps should be examined first. Russell delivers one of his best performances as a man striving for survival while searching frantically for his wife. Quinlan is appealing in a brief role. The film all depends upon her fate and how it creates turmoil in Russell's mind. J.T. Walsh steals scenes as a trucker who may or may not be responsible for Quinlan's disappearance. There are nasty truckers in the film but they are seen more as thugs than personalities. The film is well made despite wayward elements within its plot solution. It is a vacationer's nightmare. Score: 8 ½ / 10

chaos-rampant This is from the film noir tradition where hapless schmucks find themselves caught in the gears of nightmare, the abstract weave of roads on a map in the credit sequence might as well be the strings of fate the schmuck is tied to and forced to dance.Suitably abstract at first, a happily modern life, exemplified in the SUV with its fancy leather and electronics, that for some inexplicable reason breaks down on the road and the couple get out to be greeted only by a hostile nothingness. In the western man was master of this world, here witless noir pawn. The suggestion is that everything might have been okay had he not stepped on the gas too hard because he panicked, the anxiety causing the breakdown. But this is soon abandoned for ordinary schemes where the fragility of that modern life is exposed by having it so easily exploited as someone reaching under the hood of a car and snapping two wires that held it together. It is still his suburban nightmare of having lost his wife and not having enough money in that Boston bank account to get her back with because he paid for the fancy car but now we have petty conmen looking for just money and everything clear and simple.So this is one of those films where you can see the wonderful ambiguities of noir being supplanted by a simple traction, another is Lethal Weapon. First the thriller and then action mechanics. By the end it's silly and straightforward, the sole reason not to turn it off being that you might want to see people avoid being run over by a truck or hang from a bridge.