Detour

There are two pos­si­ble effects that come from lift­ing the title of a respect­ed movie clas­sic: on the one hand, it can be per­ceived as an auda­cious, assur­ing wink to savvy view­ers that you’re aware, as a film­mak­er, of your movie’s debt to hal­lowed clas­sics of the medi­um; on the oth­er hand, it can serve to accen­tu­ate how much more desir­able revis­it­ing old­er, bet­ter films would be, than to sit through a pret­ty bad new one.

If we’re being gen­er­ous with regard to Christo­pher Smith’s neo-noir runaround, Detour, it almost fits into both of the above. Edgar G Ulmer’s not-so-neo-noir of the same name, from 1945, is with­out doubt the supe­ri­or movie, but it doesn’t real­ly have all that much in com­mon with this film’s sto­ry, which owes a big­ger debt to such ​’90s throw­backs as Tony Scott’s rois­ter­ing crime caper, True Romance.

But Smith does have an inspired trick up his sleeve as a way to enliv­en what is very famil­iar mate­r­i­al, but he only man­ages to sus­tain the inter­est for a short while. It arrives in the form of a par­al­lel plot­ting device that specif­i­cal­ly recalls, of all films, 1998’s choco­late box explo­ration into the but­ter­fly effect, Slid­ing Doors. And lest there be any doubt about the explic­it nod to Gwynnie’s tube-hop­ping opus, cast mem­ber John Lynch turns up here in a glo­ri­fied cameo.

These dif­fer­ent paths come as a result of law stu­dent Harp­er (Tye Sheri­dan) mak­ing a drunk­en deal with the dev­il. The dev­il is a foul-mouthed bad boy played by Emory Cohen, who has come to col­lect his pound of flesh the fol­low­ing morn­ing. One path fol­lows Harp­er accom­pa­ny­ing the crim­i­nal and his abused girl­friend Cher­ry (Bel Pow­ley) to Las Vegas to kill his loathed step­fa­ther (Stephen Moy­er), who, he dis­cov­ers, is head­ing there on a busi­ness trip. Mean­while, in an alter­na­tive plot real­i­ty, we see the lad instead decide to stay home and con­front the way­ward patri­arch about his griev­ances before he heads off.

The prover­bial excre­ment hits the fan pret­ty swift­ly in both cas­es, which might have lent the film some sort of the­mat­ic weight were it not for an addi­tion­al struc­tur­al device that fea­tures lat­er on. This in turn serves to under­mine any depth sug­gest­ed by the dual time­line con­ceit. Not that it promised all that much to begin with. With its slick, split screen com­po­si­tions and puz­zle box plot­ting, Detour is super­fi­cial­ly com­pelling in bursts, but the ele­ments nev­er coa­lesce into any­thing of substance.

At the cen­tre of Smith’s film is a trio of tried-and-test­ed young tal­ents: Pow­ley made her mark as a sexed up school­girl in Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Cohen turned up the charm as an Ital­ian-Amer­i­can dream­boat in Brook­lyn; while Sheri­dan excelled in sand­blast­ed father-fig­ure dra­ma, Mud. So it feels dou­bly sad to say that all three are com­plete­ly wast­ed in vapid, two-dimen­sion­al roles.

Pow­ley, in par­tic­u­lar, suf­fers the indig­ni­ty of hav­ing to play a stock strip­per femme fatale. Indeed, her super­flu­ous, slow-motion pole dance that sits beside the film’s open­ing cred­its sequence does serve as a use­ful and imme­di­ate red flag as to the lazi­ly famil­iar road the under­pow­ered film will tum­ble down.