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With J.T. Walsh, Dennis Hopper, and Lara Flynn Boyle in your desert thriller, it's hard to go wrong, and in his riveting sophomore feature, John Dahl rarely gets tripped up. Why, even Nicolas Cage is in fine form, filling this small movie with wit and a surprising toughness that is refreshing in a world of pulled punches and pointless violence. Tragically, Dahl's output has slowly meandered into irrelevant Hollywood fluff, but you can remember some of his great, early work with this film. It gets a little self-consciously twisty in the last act, but it's all good. This trip through the Wyoming desert (though none of it was shot there) is one you won't soon forget.
