New Release Review - Texas Killing Fields

Directed by: Ami Canaan Mann
Starring: Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jessica Chastain, Chloe Moretz

Ami Canaan Mann is none other than the daughter of Michael Mann. His directing skills sadly don't seem to be hereditary.
The most basic skill a director needs is to be able to communicate information to the audience. I was scratching my head through most of the movie with no clue as to what exactly I was watching. There are plot threads that just seem to be dropped with no resolution. Corpses turn up and it's not clear if these are the corpses of characters we saw alive earlier. The geography is conveyed terribly; most of it is set in the "Killing Fields" which we learn is outside the jurisdiction of cops Worthington and Morgan, but we can never establish where their jurisdiction begins and ends. The overall feeling is like reading a book that someone tore a bunch of pages from.
The plot from what I could gather is based on true events where young women have been going missing in an area of Texas now known as the "Killing Fields". We get a good cop bad cop partnership who lend a hand to Chastain's detective from another county. Chastain is the only good thing about this film, she blows away the rest of the cast although I have to say Worthington is slowly growing into a competent actor. This is definitely his strongest performance to date.
There's really nothing here to recommend, it's little more than a poorly directed double-episode of a TV cop show.
3/10

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