One might be forgiven for forming very low expectations for this crime flick given its poster’s generically moody imagery showing star Seann William Scott holding a gun with an electricity pylon in the background. What a nice surprise to discover this is in fact a comedy, better yet one that’s actually often funny, in a blokey, improv sort of way.
The conceit is that in the tiny Tennessee town of Colt Lake a man is murdered in the street, run over by a car so many times that he looks like meatloaf. Clueless but kindly local cop Sam Evans (Johnny Simmons) and his deputy DJ (Chance Perdomo) make a feeble stab at investigating, but are soon upstaged when special agent Bobby Gaines (Scott) suddenly shows up, representing a statewide taskforce, and takes over the case. Gaines’ methods may be a little on the violent side and not strictly by the book, but he gets confessions amazingly quickly and soon he works his way up the (admittedly) short crime food chain until he finds the main bad guy. There are a few twists but the crime plot is of much less significance than the southern-fried backchat: a constant patter of men insulting each other, maligning one another’s manhood, and generally describing each other as small town failures.
