First Hit: Despite a thin plot line, Amanda Seyfried brought intensity to this role which was worth watching.
There isn’t quite enough backdrop and history to give a good historical framework and picture of Jill (Seyfried) but the film tries to fill in the blanks by giving storylines and flashbacks to give the audience some sense of why she is the way she is.
We see her at the beginning being very cautious which is supposed to identify that she’s been down this road before and will do anything to keep it from happening again. What we learn is that she was dumped in a dirt hole in a vast national park near Portland and was able to escape but not before finding out that there were others before her who were in and died in this hole. She thinks he’s after her and her sister.
The police however, don’t believe a word of what she says so they don’t help her when her sister goes missing. The police, in this film, are portrayed as nincompoops and I hope aren’t reflective of detectives at the Portland Police Department. They even added a new detective to this case, Peter Hood (played by Wes Bentley), who was weird enough to make the audience think he is the killer.
There was no reason for this and the film would have been fine without this character. The woman police officer (Officer Ash – played by Erin Carufel), who was supposed to be a voice of reason was portrayed stupidly.
The lead detective Powers (played by Daniel Sunjata) was so un-police like that I truly wondered why he was there at all.
Despite the very thin way this film was written, Seyfried made it work watching and was the only reason to watch this film.
Seyfried is very good at holding this character’s traits of fear, strength, drive, and resolve to finding and eliminating the man who once captured her throughout this film. Carufel was mostly useless. Sunjata looked good but from a police officer’s ability to deduce and be inquisitive he lacked everything that would make him a detective. Bentley had no reason to be in the film. Allison Burnett wrote a very weak script. Heitor Dhalia didn’t get anything much from the characters except Seyfried which tells me she did this on her own.
Overall: Maybe worth a rainy boring Sunday afternoon view.