The Price We Pay

 If there's a pawn shot in a movie, odds are something violent is going to happen in it. In Ryûhei Kitamura's The Price We Pay, it's a botched robbery.

 Three robbers go in: Cody (Stephen Dorff), the professional, principled one, Alex (Emile Hirsch), the hotheaded psycho, and John (Jesse Kinser), the fuck-up who gets shot in the leg and brought in a getaway driver that leaves them all in a lurch as soon as guns are fired.

 Alex unnecessarily kills an innocent man, and is about to kill another person, Grace (Gigi Zumbado) until Cody steps in and points out they may need a hostage and alternate means of egress.

 The trio and their captive make it far into the New Mexico back roads before their car breaks down, and then they take shelter in a nearby farm where a fidgety teen (Tyler Sanders, who died a few months after production wrapped - the film is dedicated to him) nervously lets them take over one of the farmhand bungalows.

 It's clear that there's something iffy even before a curious Alex discovers a huge underground facility under the barn. Our heroes have stumbled into an organ harvesting operation, and soon they're all strapped into gurneys under the tender care of the Doctor (Vernon Wells) and his gigantic underling.

 Yes, this movie can accurately be summarized as what if From Dusk Till Dawn but if it left-turned into Hostel instead.

 Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of Hostel-style "hey, all the characters are now helpless captives, let's torture them for a bit until they manage to find a way out!" plots. There's some pretty impressive carnage (and a really fun use of a gas canister) once the tables are turned, but it's too little, too late. The script, by Christopher Jolley, fails to give any of the characters any depth, and completely lacks the intelligence needed for any of the verbal sparring - be it between Cody and Alex, Grace and the kid, or anyone and The Doctor - to be halfway entertaining or even tense. And the monologue that gives the movie its title is just painful.

 There's also the fact that... well, nothing much happens throughout. And that, coupled with a dour, joyless tone kind of robs the film the chance to devolve into the sort of b-movie fun it could have gone for.

 Dorff and Hirsch are both credited as producers, and they both give themselves fairly showy roles. They do well, as does Zumbado, but none of them can do much to prevent their characters from simultaneously feeling both poorly defined and like walking clichés.

 I'm not a huge fan of Kitamura as a director, though I do respect that he's kept some of that deranged excess and energy from Versus. That excess unfortunately carries over to the style here (jittery zooms, whip pans, choppy editing). It's a shame, especially when the first half showed better filmmaking. It didn't bother me  too much, but I didn't enjoy it either. Which, come to think of it, is basically how I'd describe the movie as a whole.