Hit and Run

Hit and Run, another straight-to-DVD thriller starring actress and Princeton student Laura Breckenridge, is marginally better than Amusement, but suffers from the problems--the similarities to earlier films, and profound holes in logic. Breckenridge plays a college students who has had a few too many shots at a bar. On her drive home she swerves to miss something in the road. But she gets home okay and goes to bed. Then she hears noises from the garage. Turns out she ran into a guy, and he's still alive, skewered on her bumper. Oops!

Panicking, she ends up killing him with a golf club (she thinks) and burying him in a shallow grave. Of course in films like this people can be awfully tough to kill, and it turns that this guy (played by a good actor, Kevin Corrigan) has the kind of resistance that Wolverine has. Breckenridge and Corrigan have a battle that involves gardening shears, a bitten-off ear, and an electric plug jabbed in an eye socket.

You have to forgive two big problems in the story. One is that Breckenridge was so drunk that she didn't notice hitting a man, and then didn't notice on her bumper when she got home (the script calls for the lightbulb in the garage being burned out, but that still isn't enough). Then you have to believe that Corrigan could go through everything he did and still not only be alive, but to be superhumanly spry (at one point Breckenridge leaves knocked out cold and drives away, but somehow he ends up in front of her car several hundred yards away). There are also errors in the timeline that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that the film's New Jersey seems to have very early sunsets.

Then there is the fact that this film borrows heavily from other films, notably I Know What You Did Last Summer and Stuck. Neither of those are great films, so this isn't an egregious crime, but you'd think that someone would be a bit embarrassed to rip another film off so blatantly.

But the film is stylishly directed by Enda McCallion, who exercises film-school chops by having such interesting shots as a point-of-view from the bottom of a toilet while someone throws up. Then there's Breckenridge, who may be in a disposable thriller but treats it very seriously. She is terrific in the scenes where she is dealing with her plight, coming close to a nervous breakdown. The films deals with some interesting moral conundrums, as she is the heroine but is extremely guilty of a crime, and Breckenridge handles that well. I only hope that she is called upon to use her talent in better projects in the future.