Review of Texas Killing Fields (2011) by Strayarrows — 11 Jan 2019

Texas Killing Fields has everything that should make it a solid crime thriller: strong premise, great location, and talented actors, but the movie ultimately mishandles all three, which makes it even worse than your average bad film.

With its sloppily pieced together script and blatantly obvious distractions that are pretty much spoon fed to the viewer the entire time, I'm not sure the writers even knew what they were going for with this story. There are a lot of elements that seem lazily inserted, as if they were ideas scrapped from another story and stitched into this at the last minute. It gives us no reason to care for any three of the detectives nor the victims and none of the characters ever really seem to act like they're connecting on any human-level. It randomly inserts Christianity into the film as though it's going to make some kind of point about God and the suffering mankind goes through, but in the end it's forgotten by the writers and you're left wondering what it was all about.

My biggest issue with the film was that Sam Worthington's character has unresolved angst and oddly placed tension with the rest of the cast that left me questioning if the big twist of the story was to reveal that he was the murderer. But no, it was just bad writing. As a fan of this genre, you'll want to mass on this one.