Remember that movie In The Valley of Elah? It was the movie that Tommy Lee Jones starred in before this one. Yeah, this is exactly the same movie. I've been a huge fan of Jones ever since he first came to my attention in Under Siege, but come on man, time to branch out a little bit, you know? On the other hand, In The Valley of Elah, which is just as disappointing as In the Electric Mist (but doesn't have nearly as bizarre a title), was released the same year that Jones appeared in No Country For Old Men, so I guess the man deserves some credit. But I'm still getting over The Missing and The Hunted. Yawn!
This time, Jones plays Dave Robicheaux, an alcoholic who is a regular at the bars, where he orders drinks that he never drinks. He's a detective in the deep south, and one day he spots an Italian sports car speeding through the sleepy streets of their town. When he pulls it over, he finds it's being driven by Elrod Sykes (Peter Saarsgard), a local boy who has become a movie star but is now drag racing through his town drunk out of his mind. Dave sidesteps the expected bribes and goes to run him in like he should, but changes his mind when Sykes tells him he knows where a dead body is.
Before you go thinking about Stand By Me, the most famous "I know where there's a dead body" movie ever made, this one goes in a completely different direction. The body is the result of a decades-old hate crime, where a bunch of racists had chained a black man and then shot him while he ran through the swamps for his life. Dave, a 17-year-old boy at the time, actually witnessed the crime from across the swamp but never figured out who the killers were. Now, the location of the body has been revealed and it has become his life's mission to bring the killers to justice.
Complicating the movie more than necessary is a simultaneous investigation that Dave is running about the murder of a blonde prostitute and, worst of all, some truly bizarre run-ins with the Civil War generals out in the woods. There is suggestion that it is just a local group of dedicated fanatics in the middle of a Civil War re-enactment, but at times it seems more like an LSD flashback than anything else.
Ultimately the movie is nothing but a tedious wait to see some racist dirtbags get what they deserve for a vicious hate crime that happened decades earlier. There is a brief approach of the difficult subject of forgiving someone for a past crime when they have made genuine change, although the change portrayed in the movie is not genuine so the idea is dropped pretty quick. There is always a feeling that the movie is about to take off but it just never does, and when the end credits start to roll there's a distinct feeling that you may have just wasted a bunch of time.
I should mention that the movie is based on a book called "In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead," which I haven't read, and I understand that some fans of the book are pretty impressed with the film adaptation, so there may be something more to be said about the movie than I give it credit for here. But as an unprepared moviegoer, there definitely seems to be something missing here. None of the performances are disappointing and the location where the movie was shot is undeniably beautiful, but it just seemed to me that nothing materialized along the way
This time, Jones plays Dave Robicheaux, an alcoholic who is a regular at the bars, where he orders drinks that he never drinks. He's a detective in the deep south, and one day he spots an Italian sports car speeding through the sleepy streets of their town. When he pulls it over, he finds it's being driven by Elrod Sykes (Peter Saarsgard), a local boy who has become a movie star but is now drag racing through his town drunk out of his mind. Dave sidesteps the expected bribes and goes to run him in like he should, but changes his mind when Sykes tells him he knows where a dead body is.
Before you go thinking about Stand By Me, the most famous "I know where there's a dead body" movie ever made, this one goes in a completely different direction. The body is the result of a decades-old hate crime, where a bunch of racists had chained a black man and then shot him while he ran through the swamps for his life. Dave, a 17-year-old boy at the time, actually witnessed the crime from across the swamp but never figured out who the killers were. Now, the location of the body has been revealed and it has become his life's mission to bring the killers to justice.
Complicating the movie more than necessary is a simultaneous investigation that Dave is running about the murder of a blonde prostitute and, worst of all, some truly bizarre run-ins with the Civil War generals out in the woods. There is suggestion that it is just a local group of dedicated fanatics in the middle of a Civil War re-enactment, but at times it seems more like an LSD flashback than anything else.
Ultimately the movie is nothing but a tedious wait to see some racist dirtbags get what they deserve for a vicious hate crime that happened decades earlier. There is a brief approach of the difficult subject of forgiving someone for a past crime when they have made genuine change, although the change portrayed in the movie is not genuine so the idea is dropped pretty quick. There is always a feeling that the movie is about to take off but it just never does, and when the end credits start to roll there's a distinct feeling that you may have just wasted a bunch of time.
I should mention that the movie is based on a book called "In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead," which I haven't read, and I understand that some fans of the book are pretty impressed with the film adaptation, so there may be something more to be said about the movie than I give it credit for here. But as an unprepared moviegoer, there definitely seems to be something missing here. None of the performances are disappointing and the location where the movie was shot is undeniably beautiful, but it just seemed to me that nothing materialized along the way