High Ground

One cannot help but feel pity for the actors. From beginning to end, one feels a persistent sense of embarrassment on their behalf. Of course, they must earn a living and find work. But one wonders just how dire their financial circumstances must have been to compel them to collaborate with such an appallingly inept director and writer.

The direction is astonishingly poor, even worse than the already weak writing. Must the assailants, by any measure, be portrayed with such staggering stupidity, their assault on the ranch so laughably uncoordinated and devoid of even the most basic strategic logic?

Here we have a principal antagonist in pursuit of a key witness, presumably someone who could implicate him in a series of capital offences, likely condemning him to life imprisonment. So far, so good. In the course of this pursuit, he indiscriminately kills nearly everyone he encounters, presumably to eliminate potential witnesses. Fair enough. But then he inexplicably spares the life of a woman to subject her to a fate "worse than death," as he puts it (his meaning being: now you have to live with the guilt of having seen all your friends die because of you). But of course, her survival now renders her a direct eyewitness to mass murder, capable of testifying and securing the villain's conviction, even if he would succeed in killing the original key witness he is chasing.

The sheer lack of narrative logic and intelligence on display is staggering. One is left to marvel: how does a script of such implausibility and incoherence even secure financing? Who, in their right mind, would fund such a spectacular heap of nonsense?

One can only hope that the actors emerge from this debacle with their reputations intact and are offered material more worthy of their abilities.