Midnight in the Switchgrass Review: A Turgid Attempt at an Ersatz True Detective

Randall Emmett’s directorial debut is virtually indistinguishable from the scores of cheap VOD action thrillers that he’s produced to date.

Midnight in the Switchgrass
Photo: Lionsgate

Women’s bodies are often displayed as objects in thrillers about serial killers, and Randall Emmett’s Midnight in the Switchgrass is no exception. Right out of the gate, a hapless driver urinating by the side of the road stumbles across the artfully placed corpse of a young woman, the latest victim of a killer prowling the sweaty Florida Panhandle for wayward girls. The police quickly arrive on the scene, and after Officer Byron Crawford (Emile Hirsch) is brought up to speed on the body’s identity, he pivots to ask his colleague, Detective Yarbrough (Michael Beach), how his wife is doing. And without missing a beat, Yarbrough replies sardonically, “Pain in the ass, as usual.” Turns out that when it isn’t displaying women as objects, the film has no problem treating them as objects of ridicule.

Within this blatantly misogynistic world, Rebecca Lombardo (Megan Fox), an ass-kickin’, beer-drinkin’ F.B.I. agent, represents some kind of corrective. Heading up a prostitution sting in the area alongside Karl Helter (Bruce Willis, in a spectacular impersonation of a wax dummy), Rebecca takes no prisoners in her quest to rid Florida’s truck stop hotels of pedophiles. But once the sting operation is shut down as a result of her gleefully, recklessly violent methods (“I like the opportunity to blast these motherfuckers,” she hisses at one point), and Karl disassociates from her out of fear of getting killed, Rebecca teams up with the similarly persistent Byron to track down a killer who’s become a target in both of their respective cases.

Yet for all the film’s insistence on setting up Rebecca as a feminist badass, no sooner does she join forces with Byron than she stupidly gets kidnapped and imprisoned by the very killer she’s hunting, Peter (Lukas Haas), a local trucker and family man. For his part, Peter doesn’t have much of a realistic m.o., but a throwaway scene of him feverishly sniffing a collection of his victim’s panties does establish him as your garden-variety movie psychopath.

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Chaining up a drugged Rebecca in his backyard shed where he’s been keeping a young missing girl named Tracey (Caitlin Carmichael), Peter menacingly muses in his Southern accent about his latest catch, “You’re a smart one, eh? That’s okay, I kinda like the smart ones,” which doesn’t so much expand the audience’s understanding of the killer’s motivation and behavior as indicate that screenwriter Alan Horsnail watches really bad movies.

In his directorial debut, Emmett is seemingly looking to replicate an ersatz True Detective, complete with grungy color palette, somber string music, and hokey narration. But without any sort of genuine introspection into what makes cops or killers tick, Midnight in the Switchgrass is ultimately indistinguishable from any of the scores of cheap VOD action thrillers that Emmett is notoriously known for producing (many of which feature Willis).

The film’s last act is taken up by Byron’s frantic search to find Rebecca—a rushed investigation that so effortlessly brings results that it’s a wonder that Peter wasn’t caught long ago. But don’t go looking for a comment on police incompetence in Midnight in the Switchgrass, as the filmmakers prefer to devote screen time to clichéd scenes of Peter lasciviously breathing over Rebecca as she helplessly waits for Byron to swoop in and save the day.

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“Nobody’s ever stood up for those girls and I just can’t seem to reconcile that no more,” Byron declares early in the film, strangely positioning him, not Rebecca, as the real white knight for abused females everywhere. And as Midnight in the Switchgrass turgidly plods along, Byron’s line sticks with the viewer, if only because it so perfectly, though inadvertently, applies as much toward the filmmakers behind the camera as it does for the ludicrously inept cops in front of it.

Score: 
 Cast: Emile Hirsch, Megan Fox, Bruce Willis, Lukas Haas, Caitlin Carmichael, Olive Elise Abercrombie, Colson Baker  Director: Randall Emmett  Screenwriter: Alan Horsnail  Distributor: Lionsgate  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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