Mojave

William Mon­a­han, best known as the screen­writer of Mar­tin Scorsese’s The Depart­ed, steps behind the cam­era for only the sec­ond time for the neo-west­ern thriller, Mojave. We join burnt out Hol­ly­wood star Thomas (Gar­ret Hed­lund) as he heads to the near­by desert with two giant bot­tles of rum, look­ing to escape from Bev­er­ly Hills but obliv­i­ous of the dan­gers that lurk over the rocky landscape.

He’s on a path of self destruc­tion, smash­ing bot­tles and scream­ing at coy­otes in a drunk­en rage. He totals his Jeep dur­ing a casu­al dri­ve across the moun­tains, an ​‘acci­dent’ which evokes his sui­ci­dal dis­po­si­tion. He rolls away from the wreck­age, but spies a rifle bar­ing sil­hou­ette in the dis­tance. The gun­slinger, Jack (Oscar Isaac) arrives in a cow­boy hat and caped-coat ensem­ble – a true spaghet­ti west­ern throwback.

With a big shiny knife and a kill count etched onto the bar­rel of his gun, Jack also brings with him the kind of hyper-artic­u­late and intel­li­gent dia­logue we’ve come to expect from Mon­a­han. He express­es a mur­der­ous lev­el of com­plex­i­ty, even com­par­ing him­self to the dev­il. All the while Thomas’ anx­i­ety in the com­pa­ny of this tres­pass­er leads into an abrupt blade fight and the start­ing point for desert-scape standoff.

Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Don Davis cap­tures the desert’s tran­quil and soli­tary ambi­ence, its vast rocky typog­ra­phy and the glim­mer­ing Cal­i­for­nia sun­set in this open­ing seg­ment. The dead­ly pur­suit across the dust bowl plays out. ​“Game on broth­er,” Jack announces upon dis­cov­er­ing the address of his tar­get, and the cat and mouse chase tran­si­tions to the Hol­ly­wood hills. It soon becomes clear that one of these guys will die, but who else will fall along the way?

Mojave keeps you ques­tion­ing the mys­te­ri­ous motives of socio­path­ic Jack until all is revealed dur­ing a deci­sive shoot-out scene. Isaac does a great job as the vil­lain, mir­ror­ing Javier Bardem’s Anton Chig­urh from the Coen broth­ers’ No Coun­try of Old Men. Yet Thomas isn’t an inter­est­ing or espe­cial­ly sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ter, while Hedlund’s per­for­mance doesn’t make the final encounter any more excit­ing or rev­e­la­to­ry. Bar the odd explo­sive moment, the film ends up being quite tir­ing. Mojave feels like it’s try­ing to rep­re­sent a dark rela­tion­ship between Hol­ly­wood and the desert, but the dra­ma is engulfed in over­ly com­plex dia­logue and an elu­sive message.