A quirky little indie about a young man’s quest for personal redemption, “Reach the Rock” offers an intriguing premise and a few laughs but ultimately falls well short of the goals it sets for itself. Modest pic, which boasts the involvement of writer/co-producer John Hughes, aspires to, but never quite attains, an emotional connection with its audience. Theatrical life will consequently be exceptionally short. Pic opens today in New York, L.A. and Chicago.
First-time director William Ryan was a Hughes protégé, having worked for him in a number of production capacities since 1990’s “Home Alone.” Although a few of the physical gags and exchanges in this mostly dramatic outing recall moments in that and earlier Hughes-scripted films (“Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club”), new pic has neither the light touch nor sharp timing that gave those films their popular appeal.
Alessandro Nivola plays Robin Fleming, a young man whose penchant for troublemaking lands him in the Shermer, Ill., slammer one hot summer night after a seemingly random act of vandalism. A small, almost comically deserted town, the Mayberry of the Midwest, Shermer has a police force of two officers: the gruff sergeant, Phil Quinn (William Sadler) and his dimwitted deputy patrolman, Ernie (Bruce Norris). There’s an unspoken, bitter history between Quinn and Robin: The cop blames him for the death of his nephew (Norman Reedus, in a brief flashback) in a drunken swimming accident four years earlier.
When the cops are busy, Robin steals a key and slips away, wreaking more havoc on the town. But Quinn and Ernie can’t blame Robin, as whenever they check his cell they find him there, smiling innocently. Robin’s goals are twofold: to persuade his ex-girlfriend Lise (Brooke Langton) to come down and bail him out, allowing for one last heart-to-heart, and to force a verbal confrontation with Quinn, finally wearing down the cop’s resistance with humor and trickery.
In this context, the title is an all-too-obvious metaphor for communication that feels, like the conflicts themselves, somewhat forced. To Robin, both Lise’s attention and Quinn’s forgiveness are elusive goals. And yet he seems to gain nothing — no real self-knowledge, no apparent relief — by striving to reach them, rendering the goals themselves almost pointless.
Still, Robin announces he has matured through this experience, a statement of forced character development that feels so inaccurate as to seem deeply ironic.
Given its cynical, vaguely absurdist tone, this may be Hughes’ darkest film yet. Perhaps deliberately, nearly all the characters here seem to suffer from a terminal shallowness that makes it difficult to feel the least bit invested in their welfare (unlike, say, the writing of TV’s David E. Kelley, where quirkiness doesn’t preclude, but sometimes facilitates, emotional investment).
Nivola, who was a memorably sly sidekick to Nicolas Cage in “Face/Off,” has little range to explore in this role. And Sadler, a fine, rugged looking thesp, wrests what tension he can from his character but comes up a bit short.
John McEntires’ synthesized music is distracting, overly loud and seems wholly inappropriate in this lethargically paced film. Two other notable credits, Christopher Cronyn as exec producer and John Hughes III as music supervisor, signal the participation of second generation Hollywood.