a5c7b9f00b Jeff and Amy Taylor are moving to California and must drive across the country. When they find themselves stranded in the middle of a desert with hardly anyone or anything around, their trip comes to a sudden halt. Amy had taken a ride with a friendly trucker to a small diner to call for help, but after a long time, Jeff becomes worried. He finds that no one in the diner has seen or heard from his wife. When he finds the trucker who gave Amy the ride, the trucker swears he has never seen her. Now Jeff must attempt to find his wife, who has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. But who can he trust? After their new Jeep conks out on a desolate stretch of Arizona highway, a well-heeled Massachusetts couple accepts the help of a kindly, honest-seeming trucker, who drives the wife to a diner while the husband stays behind to &quot;protect&quot; the vehicle. After saying goodbye, the husband gets two surprises: the Jeep starts, and his wife never actually arrived at the diner, and the trucker doesn&#39;t recollect having picked her up at all… Kurt Russell and his wife (not Goldie Hawn but someone else) are moving from Massachusetts to San Diego. In the middle of the desert, they break down and become victims of an elaborate conspiracy to kidnap, murder and steal from unsuspected travellers. But Kurt Russell doesn&#39;t put up with your crap: he&#39;s Michael Douglas in a mullet.<br/><br/>The film started out fairly slowly, with the couple being stranded and Russell wandering around looking for his wife. So in the first half you might not want to watch when you&#39;re a bit tired. But all this will come back later, so pay attention. The cops, the diner patrons and the truckers all have an important part to play when this blows wide open.<br/><br/>This is one of the most intense Kurt Russell films out there, at least without being silly or science fiction. No John Carpenter or Snake Plissken here. Just a man who goes to the edge when the woman he loves is gone. Jumping on moving semi trailers, getting in gun fights, kidnapping kidnappers. Russell gets more and more boldthe film goes on (which makes the film sort of like &quot;Falling Down&quot;, but that&#39;s the only way they are similar).<br/><br/>Not sure what else you need to know since that&#39;s the gist: Kurt Russell getting angry. And without giving anything away, let me just say that if you like the movie you&#39;ll love the ending because it goes way over the top (in a good way).<br/><br/>Great movie for three guys and a keg to watch. Not sure about it being a good date movie, but it&#39;s romantic, so who knows? If the ability to maintain a muscle tightening suspense almost without letup from 10 minutes into a film right to the end is an art form, then writer, director, and editor of this one certainly are artists. The mysterious disappearance of husband or wife under unexplained circumstances is not especially new, but this story breaks new ground once we know what the answer is, in that our nerves are ground to a fine edginess while we are finding out. To say more would give away too much and a first time viewer who likes this kind of story is in for a treat. Cast and production values are all first rate, and the background is most of the southwestern U.S.A. The movie's surrender to banality is all the more dispiriting because it gets off to such a good start.
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