Glenn Plumber gives a perfect performance as an earnest, highly motivated petty criminal, with the best intentions, all of which go awry. There is a plan, an exchange of bowling bags filled with cocaine and money. The setting for this ominous rendezvous is an abandoned cabin in a vast and forbidding desert. One of the most hopeless settings ever seen in film. And our hero's chosen criminal associates don't have an ounce of focus, or even a sense of cause-and-effect, and, sadly, he too has this problem. I guess that makes this a Black Comedy. But it's a black comedy with tremendous elegance. There's nothing ugly in the telling of it. Paced with a droll formality, in tidy little chapters, with titles: "The Wrong Man"... "The Right Man"... each chapter presents us with a rising tsunami of wrong moves, misperceptions, horrible mistakes. Doom. The flummoxed hero seeks wisdom in a picture book, found on the floor, hallucinates an ancient Apache wise man who silently offers him interesting but unhelpful tips on desert survival. What a crazy little digression! Strangely real, strangely moving, strangely full of, well, grace. We sense that the hero's pole-axed dumbness is itself a kind of grace. Like a nearly-blind Mister Magoo, he just might get through this booby-trapped maze, and we want this for him. The movie is making us want this. It'a a perfect seduction. We stay with him through a whole series of encounters with mythically perfect antagonists, including the sublime Rae Dawn Chong, a crescendo rising to absolute mayhem, and stagger on out with a raggedly absurd happy ending. Crazy. Wonderful. Nicely done. I think this should be a famous movie.
