When a group of friends (Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven and Stephen Dorff) get lost on the way to a sports event, they end up getting chased by a local street gang (led by Denis Leary).
Judgement Night is the movie I thought Trespass was.
Like Trespass, it also had an extended gestation - it started out as an idea from a producer, with different scripts by multiple writers (including John Carpenter).
I heard it was meant to be something like an urban version of Deliverance.
As is, the film never seems sure of what it wants to be.
It took me a long while to figure out that Emilio Esteves is meant to be the reformed wild man of his friend group. And I spent the movie thinking Dennis Leary and his thugs were dirty cops.
When he mentions being in prison late in the piece, I realised how miscast he is. What is worse is that one of his thugs is played by Peter Greene, an actor who emits the kind of menace the film’s big bad is supposed to convey.
There are moments which work - his diplomacy with the younger gang leader is a great deviation from expectations - it also fits Leary as a guy who is too smart for the room. He just does not convince as a hardened criminal - he is too inherently square.
The one person in the movie who works is Jeremy Piven as the friend group’s resident bullshit artist.
While Judgement Night works up some tension, it is never as scary as it wants to be - and the attempt at a message (be a man?) is too basic to resonate.
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