Teddy
Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot must be pleased with themselves. Thanks to them,
we have the National Park system, providing stalking grounds for psycho-killers
out to prey on clueless visitors. It is a national crisis, but at least Chelsea
and her friends will not be missed if the titular madman successfully bumps
them off, one-by-one, in Jenn Wexler’s The
Ranger (trailer
here),
which opens this Friday in New York.
After
stabbing a cop to escape a drug bust, Chelsea’s bandmates decide to hole-up in
her Uncle Pete’s old cabin until the heat blows over. Wisely, they do everything
they can to antagonize the park ranger on their way in. Ordinarily, that would
be a bad strategy for fugitives from justice, but it is particularly
unfortunate in this case, because the Ranger is a raging psychopath. He also
happens to remember Chelsea from the time she spent up there as a young girl.
Of course, the Ranger hasn’t aged a day over all those years, but that is the
benefit of that clean mountain air, right?
The
Ranger also knows a thing or two about her that she maybe tried to forget. He
definitely thinks they share a connection, so he will not try to kill her—just the
rest of her friends. Frankly, it would be no great tragedy for the world to
lose these obnoxious, drug-dealing, substance-abusing, cop-bashing, nature-defiling,
self-centered brats. In fact, the film would work much better if it invited us
to root for the Ranger as he stalked the punk rock punks, but Wexler makes him
such a creepy sadist, we’re left with nobody to root for and nothing to hold
our interest.
This
film is really just a mess, starting with the flashback prologue that is hard
to reconcile with the rest of the film. This is a lazy screenplay that shows us
things for cheap effect and then forgets about them—continuity be damned.
It
is surprising to see the Glass Eye Pix logo affixed to The Ranger, because their films are usually much smarter than this.
At least, that also means Larry Fessenden’s reassuring presence graces the
film, in flashbacks as Uncle Pete. Chloe Levine fares decently as Chelsea, but Jeremy
Holm’s Ranger comes across like a poor man’s Patrick Warburton.