DVD Reviews

A Lonely Place To Die

• Rating:
• Director: Julian Gibley
• Starring: Ed Speelers
• Details: UK / 99mins (TBC).

An exciting action movie set in an isolated region of the Scottish highlands, A Lonely Place To Die is edge-of-your-seat stuff before it loses the run of itself in the last half hour. With Kill List suffering the same fate, this is happening a lot lately.
Alison (George), Ed (Speelers) and three other mountaineers plan a weekend rock climbing near Inverness. On their first day, however, Ed hears a child's voice whispering through the trees. Following the sound, the group find a pipe sticking out of the ground and it isn't long before they realise it's a breathing tube – someone is buried alive. That someone turns out to be Anna (Boyd), a Croatian girl around ten. Because she has no English, the group can't ascertain who is reponsible but they soon get answer when they are stalked by two lethal hunters…
There's something about violence when it's delivered without fanfare that makes it more real. Bourne has it. Wolf Creek has it. Here, Julian Gibley (Rise Of The Foot Soldier) has no qualms about offing a member of the cast in the least dramatic fashion – one minute they're there and the next they're falling off a cliff or clutching a bullet wound in their neck. With George the only star on show, we're never sure who is going to make it to the final reel and it adds to the already tense atmosphere.
You need a good bad guy in a movie like this and Sean Harris (Brothers Of The Head, 24 Hour Party People) fits the bill perfectly. He's downright nasty here: cold, unstoppable and very smart. At one point, after shooting a victim, he passively kneels down beside him just to watch him take his last breath. His character doesn't succumb to cliché (until the very last – more of than in a moment) and it's hard to predict what he'll do next. The heroes, however, aren't as well defined. We're never privy to more information about them other than they like climbing mountains and want to survive the ordeal.
It's a shame then that this tense ride peters out in the last half hour and descends into a mockery of what has gone before. Gibley avoided as many clichés as he could before but then gives in to the 'unstoppable bad guy' formula, of which Harris does his best with. Gibley too can be guilty of relying too much on slow motion; like a kid who has just found a new toy, the director's wanton use becomes irritating and slows everything down when it should be speeding up.

Review by Gavin Burke