Homefront

A note to filmmakers considering yet another stab at that old chestnut, the hicksploitation romp: get wild, or go home. This old-school bayou actioner featuring Jason Statham as a decent dad under fire from inbred nutjobs is moderately entertaining, but it wouldn’t have taken much – an alligator attack here, a coked-up dirty cop there – to kick it into a higher gear. Has screenwriter Sylvester Stallone (yes, that one) not seen Werner Herzog’s ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’?

Statham plays an ex-DEA agent whose yearning for the quiet life leads him into conflict with James Franco’s small-town meth dealer. There’s fun to be had: Franco never quite takes its to the lunatic heights of De Niro’s Max Cady in ‘Cape Fear’ but remains good value, and there are top-flight sweaty-white-trash turns from Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder. Best of all, Statham begins every sentence sounding like a Boston cop and ends it right back within earshot of Bow Bells. Still, with its predictable plot and tame violence, ‘Homefront’ just isn’t the Southern-fried smackdown it should have been.