Sure Fire

Wes (Blair) is a boomer. 'Boom,' he'll say. 'There are two sides to every coin: win and lose.' And 'Boom!' again, to ram home the point. These verbal eruptions echo the explosion of gunpowder - Wes's only true rapport is with his rifle. Wes lords it over family and 'friends' in Circleville, Utah - the Mormon Dixie. A successful entrepreneur and a driven man, he'll pay off a neighbour's bank loan without so much as a by-your-leave, but can't accept rejection from any quarter, least of all from his teenage son during their annual hunting trip. Blair plays Wes as if he had walked off the pages of a Jim Thompson novel, but for the rest the pickings are relatively slim. There are persuasive performances, three long (baffling) Mormon texts and a leisurely sense of pace, but Jost's curious, avant-garde naturalism doesn't find much purchase on this terrain.