One thing’s for sure: For the rest of his life, Scott Patterson will never be able to wear a baseball cap, backwards or otherwise, on any screen, big or small, without bringing Luke Danes to mind. While it’s good for the legacy, it’s frustrating for the career. Like everyone who becomes an icon, Patterson is trying to shake that typecasting, and he doesn’t seem to be doing too badly in terms of new credits–he was working before Gilmore Girls wrapped and he’s been working steadily after.
Obviously some projects come off better than others, and the 2010 TV movie, Concrete Canyons, is one of the others.
It all opens with Ben Sloane (Scott Patterson) out in the woods helping rescue a kidnap victim. He’s not sheriff of Greeley, Colorado anymore, but the movie has to show his mad tracking skills somehow. When it’s all said and done, he goes home to an empty house, where he knocks back some hard liquor and talks to his horse. His wife died, and his son, Nick (Andrew Dunbar) lives in Chicago with his wife and baby son.
Then Ben finds out Nick is in jail for murdering someone. Ben knows it can’t be true, so he jets off to Chicago where he starts sniffing around. Unfortunately, he runs afoul of Detective Susan Kincaid (Polly Shannon), who’s working on Nick’s case, or at least she seems to be. It’s hard to say what she’s been doing, because she only turns up to frown at Ben and tell him his backwoods tactics don’t work in the big city. She tells Ben to stay out of the case because it’s in her jurisdiction, not his.
Naturally, Ben doesn’t give up. He asks his daughter-in-law, Maggie (Emilie Ullerup) lots of questions, and of course Maggie’s positive Nick is innocent. Nick isn’t too happy that Dad’s in town trying to make things right because the two of them are estranged. No one even mentions the fact that Ben is a grandfather, although there are a couple of cute scenes with Maggie, Ben, and the little guy.
Much to Susan’s ire, Ben’s mad skills come into play, and he figures out the Mafia and a local construction firm are mixed up together, which means the latter is obviously not above the board, no pun intended. When Ben starts snooping around one of their construction sites, the workers beat him up and threaten him.
How weak is Concrete Canyons? Let us count the ways. The pacing is weird. It’s mostly Ben running around talking to Maggie, Susan glowering at Ben and acting like a big city snob, Ben brooding over hard liquors, construction workers and mafia henchmen who talk like cavemen, and Ben sauntering around in his cowboy hat sticking his finger into various liquids on pavement that look like ordinary mud.
Nothing really starts happening until the last twenty minutes, and even then it’s less than compelling. I probably checked the film’s progress bar every ten minutes hoping it was almost over.
It would help if Concrete Canyons looked better, but no dice there, either. The filming angles are bad, especially one shot in an interrogation room when Ben is trying to smooth things over with Nick and for some reason the camera is trained upwards from behind Ben, shooting though a doorway. It wouldn’t be so bad except that Ben is hunched over the table with his head down and his shoulders in the air, which doesn’t do anyone any favors. Even worse, the camera spins around to film Ben from the front and we get a weird closeup of Ben’s hairline. Ouch.
The problems don’t stop there, of course. Concrete Canyon’s dialogue is incredibly amateurish (One review I read said that it sounds as if a twelve year old wrote it), and there’s nothing in here that indicates anyone knows what they’re doing. Like the construction guys. When my husband worked for an HVAC company he encountered some construction workers who were real jerks, but would they really hang around a site at all hours waiting to beat people up? Maybe the sneaky ones would, but I’m guessing the usual thing is to fence sites off at night, put up surveillance cameras, and hire security.
Even worse is the so-called “law enforcement.” I get that Susan would be precious about jurisdictions, which I know real law enforcement often are, but the least she could do is take Ben’s ideas under advisement and use him for information about his son. Honestly, I don’t know how Susan got to be a detective because she’s green as grass. We never see her talking to her colleagues about what they know so far or anything of substance. It’s all about sitting behind a desk and writing what seems to be nothing on generic forms or blank paper, and when Ben starts making a little bit of headway, Susan’s as slow as molasses on the uptake. Ben basically has to school her in forensics.
The fight scenes look choreographed, too, probably because the actors pause after every move as if they’re waiting for someone to snap a photo for IMDb. I don’t know when I’ve seen fight scenes that look that bad, and I’ve seen some pretty low-budget stuff. Even Samurai Cop, one of the worst movies of all time, has more flow than this movie. That’s saying something.
I really wanted to like Concrete Canyons because Scott Patterson seems like a decent guy, but the movie is an incredibly pathetic and boring waste of time. What a bummer.
Another post is coming out on Saturday. In the meantime, I’ll be taking a little posting break because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but I’ll still be available for comments and that kind of stuff. Like if anyone wants to sign up for either of Taking Up Room’s approaching blogathons, for instance (hint, hint).Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
Concrete Canyons is free to stream for Prime customers.
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