Review: The Hitcher (2007)

The Hitcher
reviewed by Sam Osborn

Director: Dave Meyers
Cast: Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton
Screenplay: Jake Wade Wall, Eric Bernt (based on the screenplay by Eric
Red)
MPAA Classification: R (strong bloody violence, terror and language)

The title sequence for The Hitcher involves a jackrabbit. Not a real
jackrabbit, naturally, but one rendered entirely from CGI wizardry. The
creature hops twice, wiggles his nose, ruffles unconvincingly with the
live-action weeds around him, and ventures out onto the nearby highway
to be smeared across the pavement by a snarling motorist trailing the
title slide behind him. This, the opening sequence means to say, is The
Hitcher: a smudge of road kill wiped messily across the asphalt. And in
the realm of promising opening sequences, this ranks near the worst.
Equally cringe-inducing is the succeeding cut, where the open road is
swapped for the sunny college campus, with a grinning bulk of
meticulously unshaven man waving to his toned and thinned brunette
prancing towards him on their way to a riotous spring break. What, we
may ask, have we gotten ourselves into?

Actually, we've snuggled into a delightfully sordid affair. Despite
its two misguided introductions, what follows is an intensely
satisfying creep through the shady-eyed terror felt by all when
stopping on the highway for a crooked thumb hitching a ride.

The aforementioned waving hunk of man is Zachary Knighton playing Jim
Halsey, an everyday California college boy with a perky girlfriend,
this time played by "One Tree Hill" veteran Sophia Bush. The two
are more intelligent than other Slasher-film fodder, but still fall
victim to a script rigged to pose manipulative lapses in judgment. Why,
if those that are trying to protect you wish to put you into custody,
would you run from them and wiggle into a shadowy trailer park hiding
place with a psychopathic gunman close on your trail? These are
questions one must obviously suspend when viewing a Slasher film, I
suppose; and compared to the boys and girls of the Scream franchise and
I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jim and Grace are regular
valedictorians.

Anyway, the two are burning the midnight oil down a New Mexico highway,
joking mirthfully at a comfortably rainy sixty mph when a black figure
with a pointing thumb suddenly looms in the middle of the road.
Skidding through a full rotation, Jim and Grace decide not to meddle
with fate and drive off, leaving the uninjured man to find another
ride. At the next gas station, however, the hitcher (Sean Bean) appears
again, having picked up a ride soon after Jim and Grace departed.
Posing as a wet, harmless housecat, the hitcher asks for a ride and Jim
breaks down, offering to take him to the next hotel fifteen miles away.
Midway through the ride, though, the hitcher-who calls himself John
Ryder-holds a knife to Grace's eye and demands that Jim chant the
words "I Want to Die." Jim manages his first feat of
collegiate-sport heroics in response and promptly ejects John from the
speeding vehicle. John is no pesky fly on the wall, however, and no man
built for defeat. The hunt has only just begun, apparently, and Mr.
Ryder torments the young couple and all who stand in his way for the
ensuing seventy minutes.

Reminding us sometimes of the aptly titled French horror picture, High
Tension, Director Dave Meyers succeeds in holding the tension extremely
taut by doing very little. What's more frustrating than a scene of
tight-shouldered suspense without the requisite release? It leaves us
holding our breath and with no cathartic jump scare for the tension to
exhale into. The screenplay does well to mount situations, however
murky the logic behind them is, that work to create horrific triangles
of suspense. Granted, most of the screams come from blind lunges from
dark corners, the undeserving jump scare is sometimes a welcome relief
to the dead silence of suspense. Meyers also steers clear (mostly) of
the bloodbath antics of the Hostel and Saw franchises, only resorting
to excessive gore when necessary (maybe this is a byproduct of a
noticeably shabby make-up department though). His scares might not be
completely genuine or entirely affective, but they work well enough to
forward the story yarn towards the two momentous climaxes. Here, in a
sort of symphonic car chase double sequence, Meyers' music video
background gleams through. Following up on an extraordinarily
appropriate line-up of songs, an iconic, industrial techno diddy
pulsates through the soundscape. Cars launch and catapult in an
oblivion worthy of Michael Bay destruction, with precisely chosen
perspectives and split-second filmic reactions that only an old hand of
the music video industry could intuit. The scene is a kind of operatic
smackdown of vehicular menace, and one that leaves us in awe of our
lunatic baddie.

With a limited number of lines given to John Ryder and the limited IQ
dished out to the couple, The Hitcher obviously isn't attempting an
innovation to the Slasher genre. But with Sean Bean doing his best
lurking criminal pose as Mr. Ryder, and Sophia Bush proving that her
acting is more substantial than her scarily small weight, The Hitcher
is a good and satisfying execution of the genre motions.
Sam Osborn