Texas Killing Fields [DVD]

This film has attracted so many bad reviews bit I really enjoyed it. It is slow and a little complicated but worth sticking with. The story follows two detectives in the industrial city of Texas City investigating the murders of young women in the killing fields.
Sam Worthington plays the religious and conscientious one who wants to help the county police with their search for a pair of serial killers whilst Jeffery Dean Morgan plays the more aggressive partner who wants to stick to their own case involving two vicious pimps kidnapping young girls. Connecting the two cases is Chloe Moretz as a young girl from an abusive family who is somehow connected. The locations are moody and the soundtrack even moodier and yes you have to pay attention to follow the strands of the story. One reviewer criticised the pimp storyline for being left incomplete, so one of them got away, it happens. Not all polce work is neat and tidy and this film reflects that well. One scene in particular when Morgan tries to arrest the pimps is an excellent portrayal of how the best laid plans go awry.
If you enjoyed 'In the Electric Mist' and 'Surveillance' then you'll probably enjoy this.

Texas Killing Fields (TKF) tells the story of a serial-killer plaguing the deep-southern Texas town of Texas city, abandoning his victims in "The Killing Fields" a barren stretch of bayou that used to be an oilfield but is better known for its historic massacre of native Americans. Detectives Mike Sounder (Sam Worthington - Avatar) & Brian Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan - The Losers) find one of the victims and soon begin to connect the dots and realise they are on to a serial-killers trail. Meanwhile, abused & neglected daughter Luanne (Chloë Moretz - Kick-Ass) spends as much time away from home as possible, but will this make her a prime target for the killer?

TKF had me interested from the off; I mean, that's a pretty good cast right there, but I was worried how it had reached DVD and I had heard literally nothing about it and I keep my ear to the ground - nonetheless, the start is solid, the introductory scene has no credits over the chilling scene of an abandoned car, lights on, in the middle of the killing-fields, so you know the director - Ami Canaan Mann (recognise the surname? It's Michael Mann's daughter!) - wants you to take this seriously and drink in the atmosphere. However, after 20 or so minutes of intrigue, things started to get very obvious; of course, one of the detectives is in the process of a divorce and guess what? His soon-to-be-ex-wife works the jurisdiction he needs to access to find the bodies of his victims...

Morgan plays the religious-family-man-with-a-haunted-past position well, but Worthington is his usual aggressive neanderthalesque-character. Moretz holds her role adequately but I honestly felt that her acting was a little flat at times (is repeatedly glancing at the character who is speaking moodily even acting?) The real let-down was the killer - inexplicably called "Rhino" played by Stephen Graham (Tommy from Snatch) who is about 5'4" and has not even a passing resemblance to a Rhino in stature nor personality - his motives are left completely unexplained and to top it off, he has about 4 or 5 lines due to his inability to pull off a convincing Texan accent. At one point, he positively sounds cockney! It is obvious Mann has trimmed his lines back to a bare minimum to stop the accent breaking through.

We have a significant amount of time devoted to local reprobates who drive around in a classic Plymouth, pimp Levon & his muscle Rule (John Eyez & Jason Clarke respectively) but that is a story thread that goes absolutely nowhere and ends abruptly and completely inexplicably. Quite frankly, this still has me wound up as I would like to know what happened to them after the pointless minutes devoted to their character development!!

Extras: A directors commentary (*yawn*), the theatrical trailer and a cast & crew featurette.

So all in all, very dark (Danny Boyle bailed on this project due to how dark it was), poorly explained narrative, slow-pacing, dead-end plot-threads, unnecessarily-included martial strife and a really poor ending that feels like a real gut-shot after devoting 105 minutes to this dross. Zodiac-wannabe, but falls far short.

Texas Killing Fields is rich with good actors and equally good performances. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is great as a rumpled, religious older partner to Sam Worthington's cocky angry divorcee, and Chloe Grace Moretz is perfectly cast as the oddball teen they try to steer out of harm's way while investigating a clashing series of cases that all seem to connect to 'the fields' - a ghostly area of wasteland riddled with eerily dead looking trees and a reputation for being a badlands body-dump.
Ami Canaan Mann has inherited Michael Mann's flair for character and atmosphere, but unfortunately also his tendency for ponderous storytelling rather than excitement. As a result what you get is a very steady, believable, grim and not particularly exciting tale of mixed up cops hunting very twisted and genuinely unpleasant people, where nobody gets out unblemished and nobody walks away particularly better for the experience.
Harsh, grimy and bleak, it's very well done even if it suffers from a few loose ends. Just don't rent it for a party.