A good suspense movie is like traveling up a winding road in the dark. Sure there are some points of visibility but when you start hitting those turns you never know what is coming around the corner. Films like “Prisoners,” “Basic Instinct,”and “The Usual Suspects” never let you get comfortable with what you were seeing. So what goes into making a good suspense movie you might ask? Well there are things like the jilted lover or the stranger in town that everyone has heard stories about, whatever choice as a writer you make.
“Go With Me” is the latest suspense thriller to throw its hat into the ring in an attempt to make your heart race. Lillian (Julia Stiles) has just moved back to her hometown in the Pacific Northwest after her mother has past away. All she has in life is her mother’s house, so she is trying to start her life again to prove that you can go back home. She is working two jobs, one as a day care teacher and at night she is a waitress at a local watering hole. It’s at that second job she has a run in with Blackway (Ray Liotta), the man that everyone is afraid of in town. It seems Blackway is not one to let something go, so he starts harassing Lillian to get what he wants. When Lillian goes to the Sherriff, he says there is nothing he can do and refers her to the local mill to enlist their help. No one there though wants to help, but a man named Lester (Anthony Hopkins) and a kid named Nate (Alexander Ludwig) who seems to do whatever Lester asks of him. Together the three of them search the town for Blackway to do what it takes for him to leave Lillian alone.
I am sure you are thinking what I was thinking when I first looked at this movie, great cast. A movie with Hopkins and also Liotta playing a bad guy, I mean color me intrigued. Then I saw the movie, and while Lilotta is still good at playing the crazy guy, the movie is just a run of a mill thriller.
Written by Joseph Gangemi and Gregory Jacobs, from the book of the same name by Castle Freeman, Jr., the story never really gets going. For me, even as crazy Lilotta can be, the character Blackway just didn’t live up to his build-up, which left the only thing menacing in the movie, the woods that serve as the backdrop. Hopkins is ok, and Stiles does her best as the damsel in distress, but with an average and tired type of movie, it can be hard to get above the average performances. This is just another one of those movies that get thrown out there, not overly terrible, but something you will have trouble recalling not long after seeing it. I have seen lots of thrillers in my day, and for me “Go With Me” goes in the ‘non-memorable’ file, as a movie that just doesn’t have much going for it .
