This is one tight little thriller. The story involves a young man named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) who meets a serial killer (Rutger Hauer) and does the one thing no other victim has done before. He escapes. With that he wins the grand prize — the honor of being the one who gets to slay the dragon. At one point the killer even makes it easy for him. He puts a gun in the boy’s hand and points it at his own forehead. All he has to do is pull the trigger. But the young man can’t do it, and the killer keeps on killing.
Some of the criticism of the film is that we know too little about the characters. Some theorize that perhaps there’s a homoerotic connection between the two. I think they miss the allegory. I think they’re both the same person but, unlike Fight Club, there’s no final reveal. We are all capable of good and evil, but one side needs to be stronger if it can hope to defeat the other.
Even without this psychobabble, this is a movie with scene-after-scene of tense suspense, exciting action and a very chilling villain. Hauer has played similar characters in movies like Nighthawks and Blade Runner; a quiet, confident, even smiling presence who can be gentle as a lamb one moment, and then blow you away the next. He also gets to be the film’s only comic relief. That’s easy because we never get to know his victims. We rarely see him killing anybody, except when the boy is around (further enhancing the suggestion they’re one and the same).
Jennifer Jason Leigh is the other key character. She becomes the love interest for the boy, as well as the leverage the villain needs to make him stop. The scene where they all finally converge is the film’s most startling.