Depressed, self-indulgent writer-director Thomas (Garrett Hedlund) takes a break from the Hollywood rat race to drive out to the desert. There he crosses paths with Jack (Oscar Isaac), a dodgy-looking drifter full of smart-aleck patter, cheeky biblical references and Shakespeare quotations. Things do not go well, and when Jack catches Thomas making a fatal mistake, the latter finds he has a crafty new stalker, who then follows him home. Underneath the almost defiantly lazy thriller mechanics, this is more of a satire of Tinseltown mores, where it’s impossible to tell, as Jack asks at one point, who’s the bad guy since both leads are equally loathsome in different ways. That in itself is pleasantly subversive, given our collective fixation on “likable” protagonists, and it’s not hard to see parallels with writer-director William Monahan’s award-winning screenplay for The Departed. Isaac is charming and bonhomous as ever, Hedlund is suitably brooding yet dim looking, and Mark Wahlberg is a hoot as a chippy producer perpetually playing host to bored prostitutes.
