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DIFF Review: “Sacrifice” Suffers From Overly Excessive And Unnecessary Melodrama

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Four teenagers from a small Texas town come face-to-face with their own consciences after a tragic accident.

“Sacrifice” was the Texas Grand Jury Prize Winner at this year’s 2015 Dallas International Film Festival. A lot of hype surrounded the film before I saw it and to be honest, I deliberately stayed away from knowing anything about it in advance as I wanted to go in with no preconceived notions and just watch it with no prior knowledge of what the movie was about. In the end, that didn’t matter because while the movie starts off beautifully, a magnificent character study, the last act takes the earlier moments of brilliance and weighs it down with so much implausible and preposterous scenarios, that you could literally hear people at the screening groaning in disbelief and then leaving the theater before the credits even began to roll. Not the desired effect a filmmaker seeks from his audience and it makes me wonder how the movie earned such a highly commended accolade.

The story is about four friends, Hank (Luke Kleintank), his younger brother Tim (Austin Abrams) and his two best friends Ben (Lewis Tan) and Kaz (Brandon Mychal Smith). Hank is the star quarter back on his high school football team and they have just won the finals but before he accepts any scholarships for college, he, Tim, Ben and Kaz decide to go away camping for a long weekend in Kaz’s RV to a remote east Texas lake. While there, the guys have fun and drink lots of beer and early the next morning, they go hunting, with each person taking a different direction. Tim sees a deer and takes out his gun and follows it using his scope and just as it disappears behind some bushes, he pulls the trigger but as he approaches the scene, expecting to see a dead buck, instead, he sees a man, lying on the ground unconscious, covered in blood.

Tim panics and runs off and later, as the day draws to an end, Hank, Kaz and Ben are drinking and having fun around the campfire when Tim finally tells them what happened. Unsure if he’s joking or serious, they follow him and just like he said, they find the body. After a quick check, they ascertain that he is still alive and carry him back to the camper. As they make their way back into town, the injured man dies and they all begin to panic. They all agree, very begrudgingly to bury the man and afterwards, as they try to make their way back to the highway through a severe thunderstorm, Ben gets on Tim’s case about what happened and an altercation ensues between the two and in the scuffle, Hank’s rifle accidentally discharges, hitting the driver which causes the vehicle to lose control and crashes into the lake. The driver dies as a result and another is placed in a coma. Only Hank and Tim are the only two to come out standing.

Eventually back in town, they inform the authorities that the bad weather caused the RV off the road and with no apparent foul play suspected, life moves on, until a Detective Traeger (James McDaniel), begins an investigation and as he digs deeper, he realizes that both Hank and Tim’s stories are full of inconsistencies but at the same time, the disappearance of the man Tim accidentally shot, is appearing all over the news and when both he and Hank discover that he was a Park Ranger, their lives slowly begin to unravel. The cinematography and acting were excellent, you could literally feel the raw emotions as the boys tried to work out the best scenario for themselves in regards to the dead body in their camper. Because they were in a national park, drinking, drugs and hunting deer are all felony charges so in desperately wanting to do the right thing, they are torn because it seems that either way, they’re screwed.

The film slowly begins to deteriorate with so much superfluous and extraneous drama, that it pretty much sinks as a result of its own self-importance. For me, the movie would have been so much better if it was the four boys burying the dead body and then going back to their lives and how each of them deal with the guilt every day, that story would have been so much stronger in every sense but then they add the totally unnecessary accidental shooting of one of them and in the last act, without giving anything away, there is a scene that came so far out of left field, I suddenly felt like I was watching another movie altogether. I simply could not believe that this same film, which started out so auspiciously, could descend into absurdity and take away every positive facet that it had going for it. The first half of the film I would classify as perfect but by the movie’s end, it simply disintegrated until there was nothing left.

“Sacrifice” premiered at the 2015 Dallas International Film Festival

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James McDonald

Originally from Dublin, Ireland, James is a Movie Critic with 40 years of experience in the film industry as an Award-Winning Filmmaker. He is also a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association.