There’s a serial killer on the loose in Midnight in the Switchgrass, which doesn’t do its best to make Pensacola, Florida the most appealing locale in America. The headliners are Bruce Willis as Karl and Megan Fox as Rebecca, both detectives for the FBI working a sting operation targeting prostitutes and their pimps.
Emile Hirsch’s Byron is a Florida State Police Officer. He believes that several of the girls abducted in Midnight in the Switchgrass are alive and have not suffered the same fate as many young women who have turned up dead. Byron thinks that this killer keeps his “favorites” alive until he tires of them and disposes of them. There is little evidence of who this individual might be, but filmmakers are more than happy to illustrate that fact and introduce our killer at the outset.
Whereas the stars of this are supposed to be Fox’s Rebecca and Willis’ Karl, they are eclipsed by the command and determined desperation emerging from Hirsch’s Byron
Now, Willis… it’s hard to know where to start with him. It is as if he is not even trying. There’s mailing it in for a paycheck and then there is what is delivered by the veteran star. Sure, Midnight in the Switchgrass is no Die Hard or even 12 Monkeys, but a job is a job, and someone needs to dig deep to find something redeemable about the character, the film’s story, or why even bother to show up? Surely there is a hungry actor of a certain age who could have done a fine job with the character of Karl.
He’s clearly a mentor to Fox’s Rebecca and there are signs of him caring about her in a fatherly way. But it is so diluted by the absence of any kind of humanity from even his eyes that it is utterly distracted. Sadly, it’s embarrassing for him to be seen in such a way, especially when Hirsch takes material that may not be the best in the world and makes it something solely based on a stellar performance.
Fox does her genuine best with the material given. She bats her eyes and poses as a prostitute and genuinely cares about these women. It’s established that she’s tough as nails because Rebecca is called upon to kick the butt of a pimp at one point and does so handily (played by her real-life boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly, aka Colson Baker). There’s a hope in her performance that is innate. Rebecca puts herself in harm’s way as “bait” of sorts with hopes of aiding these young girls escape the life and of course, escape abuse by their pimps.
But she’s pushing it right up to that danger line with a serial killer on the loose targeting women of the night. He comes off as innocent enough. Lukas Haas is Peter, and he has a wife and toddler daughter at home. He appears to be a doting father and a devoted husband; except he seems to have a lot of secrets. Like having a barn with a padlock on it where his family doesn’t appear to be welcomed (that’s where his “kept” women are) and he seems to have to do trucking runs often—even though he has been made a manager.
It’s strange seeing Haas so charmingly creepy. This is an actor who made his name as a child with the most innocent of eyes in the Harrison Ford starring thriller Witness. He and Hirsch are the best things about Midnight in the Switchgrass. They elevate the material to a point where it is clear that these two are on a collision course and everything else with the movie is window dressing—which is a shame because the focus seems to be on Willis and Fox’s characters.
Director Randall Emmett makes his directorial debut from a script by Alan Horsnail, who is also making his big-screen debut. Writers and directors make their first films all the time, and there is a learning curve for sure. The thing about Midnight in the Switchgrass is that despite the stakes seemingly being so high, what with a serial killer on the loose and all, there never appears to be any urgency expressed by any of the characters, except for Hirsch’s Byron. But even his character has to come home under some urgent issue or another that has the viewer puzzled about priorities and young women’s body’s piling up while the only cop who has any sense about these crimes has his attention pulled in another direction.
Horsnail has created a Silence of the Lambs lite, aka“Florida edition,” and that is not always a good thing. The intensity of a race-against-time serial killer thriller is difficult to maintain and that is why there are so few that are considered the standard-bearers for their milieu. Midnight in the Switchgrass has its moments, but for the most part, it just exists.
Grade: C-