Banish all thoughts of Rod Steiger in “In the Heat of the Night” or Jackie Gleason in “Smokey and the Bandit.” The small-town Southern cop is re-imagined in “Lake City,” ya’ll, and the actor packing heat is former supermodel Rebecca Romijn.
At the moment Romijn turns up in this small-scale picture, you realize how deeply clueless this film is going to be. Co-directors Hunter Hill and Perry Moore, both first-timers in the job, don’t seem to understand movies very well.
Our hero is Billy (Troy Garity), on the lam from something. He takes a young kid, whose relationship to him is mysterious but not difficult to guess, with him as he flees the city and goes South. Retreating to the home of his mother (Sissy Spacek), he rediscovers the attractions of simple country life, or something.
The past can’t be far behind. First it’s the kid’s mother (Drea De Matteo), storming in for one big blow-up scene. Then it’s a drug-dealer type (singer Dave Matthews, a very natural screen presence), who’s interested in retrieving something from Billy.
Garity (from “Sunshine”) is the son of Jane Fonda, and he has a touch with comedy that is nowhere to be glimpsed here. You expect Sissy Spacek to come through with a certain salt-of-the-earth integrity, and she doesn’t disappoint, even given her one-note character.
But almost anybody would be defeated by the clumsiness of “Lake City,” which strands its cast in a cornfield of cliche. For starters, the film’s video look is awful, both arty and cheap-looking.
And the script by Hill and Moore is rife with sketchy characterizations of Southern folks and gangsters alike. When a good actor such as Keith Carradine, playing a gas-station owner and folk-music enthusiast, is obliged to describe his beat-up guitar by saying, “She still plays good. I’m kinda partial to her,” you just feel bad for him.
And then there’s Rebecca Romijn, no doubt stretching herself as a performer and providing Billy with some temptation to consider staying on in town. The only thing to regret about this movie’s probable box-office flop is that we will miss a possible sequel, with Romijn as a drawling, tobaccy-chewin’ sheriff who don’t brook no nonsense no-how. Maybe a TV spinoff?
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