The Desperate Hour

When a mother learns that a shooter has targeted her son's high school (and discovers that her son is one of the 5 students that the shooter is holding hostage) she finds herself in a desperate race against time to try and reach her son before it's too late...

Whilst the concept is good and had the potential to be a good social commentary (particularly in the world that we live in at the moment) The Desperate Hour/Lakewood just never quite hit the mark for me.

The simple truth is that one woman jogging around and making several frantic phone calls to try to reach her son and find out what is going on at his school is a tricky role of the dice (particularly for around 85 minutes). Added to that several implausibilities such as police allowing a civilian to talk to a shooter as a distraction for them to send in a SWAT team? What???? A repair shop that can seemingly access personal information from all and sundry from their car number plates? I'm not sure how things work in America, but I'm pretty sure in the UK that only the police and the DVLA can access that sort of information. To me it was one of those films that presented lots of unlikely events in order to make the film more exciting, but for me, these gaping flaws were simply too difficult to overlook.

On the plus side Naomi Watts gives a great performance, but there's only so much that can be done with such a threadbare screenplay. I personally feel that this would have made a good 45-60 minute crime drama episode, but the material isn't suited to a feature length film. This is self-evident by its struggle to stretch itself out over its 85 minute run time.

It has its moments, but it's one note and is spread far too thinly to be truly enjoyable or involving.