Review of Small Town Crime (2018) by Juliankennedy23 — 02 Apr 2018

Small Town Crime: A drunken Ex-cop finds an injured woman on the side of the road and it sends him into a seedy mystery involving hit men, prostitutes, and small-town criminals.

The Good: First of all I could watch Robert Forster in anything. He is wonderful here. In fact, the entire cast is spot on. Anthony Anderson is a pleasure as always and it is good to see Octavia Spencer in a movie that doesn’t threaten to give me diabetes. Lead actor John Hawkes holds it all together as the alcoholic ex-cop trying to go straight.

The direction is also very solid with some well thought out and shot action scenes particularly in the latter third of the movie. The movie keeps a good pace building both character development and tension in a natural way. It also ends well with characters reacting naturally to the events that have passed and actions having real consequences.

The Bad: I like over the top cartoonish action films (Feast ). I like alternative film noir (The Last Seduction ), and I like B movie exploitation films (Re-Animator). Small Town Crime never seems to know which it is trying to be. It never stays in one lane and the writer and director simply don’t have the craft to completely pull off the tonal changes.

For the first hour or so the film seems to be right in a perfect David Lynch groove but it never seems to want to pull the trigger in either weirdness or depravity. Sometimes the film very effectively shows the violence but other times it simply fades to black to revisit the scene later with little rhyme or reason. Considering the storyline of the film it is also a surprise that there is virtually no sex or nudity.

Small Town Crime is not exploitative enough to be a guilty pleasure. There are some great character moments in the film and some great action scenes. One could easily see how the film could have gone to a darker place, could have worn it’s B movie roots on its sleeve, or could have been a little more over the top with its action (though in all fairness it does pretty much nail this in the final third of the film). Too realistic to be cartoonish, too good-natured to be noir and too chaste to be exploitation Small Town Crime finds itself in a grey middle ground.

Also, the title of the film is awful. Sounds like a hidden Netflix category.

In Conclusion: Despite my words above, I had a really fun time with this movie. I don’t see myself revisiting it anytime soon but it is certainly worth a watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon.