REVIEW: Calibre (2018)

Run Time: 104 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: Watchable thriller, hurt by weak ending

Netflix added this movie to their service last week. A British thriller film directed by Matt Palmer, it has supposedly been in development for almost ten years, before finally getting a release of sorts.  It also got an ‘extremely positive’ critical response, but I wouldn’t go that far.  Whether you want to watch this movie depends on whether or not you’re good with being relatively entertained for 90 minutes, only to possibly (probably) feel kind of ripped off by the last ten minutes.

The film sees an aggressive Edinburgh businessman, Marcus (Martin McCann), take his friend Vaughn (Jack Lowden), whose fiancée is newly pregnant, on a hunting trip to a remote village in the Scottish Highlands.  As Vaughn is a greenhorn with a rifle, a child is accidentally shot.  One body turns to two and the friends cover up what they’ve done and after some Jeep trouble, they can’t leave the village immediately.  The pressure is on as the hardened locals from the insulated village begin to realize that something isn’t right.

The film harkens back to taut killer hick thrillers like Deliverance, or probably more accurately, Southern Comfort.  Although this movie has effective twists and turns, and really gears it up after the hour mark, you’ll feel short changed by the anticlimax it signs off with, the promise of something thrilling is canceled.  Some of the tropes are mildly annoying too; the gas tank getting shot out in a car, thereby isolating the protagonists for example.

In a village where there are no cops and the show is ran by a hierarchy of alpha males (lead by the quite frankly brilliant Tony Curran, playing Logan), it’s probably not a good idea to kill one of their kids, accidentally or otherwise.  Nobody does hardened stoic like a bunch of pissed off northern Scots lead by an ice cold Tony Curran. And so as the tense stares are exchanged and shotgun-wielding madmen start screaming, it makes the film a decent one-watch deal.