Life in a small town isn't easy, but Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) has settled in just fine. Until one night when a couple guys show up at his diner and want a little more than pie and coffee (though that's what they order). When they start to cause trouble, Tom shifts into a different gear, and quickly kills both of the men.
This turns him into an instant hero, but it also brings unwanted attention to him in the form of constant media coverage on the television and in the paper. Before long, people he hasn't seen in a number of years show up on his doorstep wanting to take him back to a life he thought he had left behind.
While the premise of the film is a good one - the killing-crazy brother of an important mob guy decides to leave that life and goes underground in middle America - the execution (pardon the pun) is a bit weak.
The first person to find Tom is Carl Fogarty (the excellent Ed Harris), who seems more suited to a role as the handler of a contract killer than someone who had his left eye nearly ripped out by barbed wire (as we learn later).
Yet Fogarty comes to town and calmly attempts to get Tom to return to Philadelphia with him, time after time. Only when Tom is confronted with his son in the hands of Fogarty does he finally confess that he is Joey Cusack, and that's when it's on - Tom kills Fogarty's henchmen, and just as Fogarty is about to kill Tom, Tom's son blasts a hole in Fogarty with the family shotgun. Nice.
Before his family can be harmed, Tom decides he needs to confront the force behind all of this, and that is his own brother, Richie Cusack (William Hurt in one of the "dirtier" roles I've seen him). When Tom gets there, it seems that Richie just wants to kill his brother Joey for all the trouble he caused him all those years ago, but "Joey" is still the killing machine he once was, and before long, everyone is dead, even Richie. So Tom heads back home.
The movie ends with Tom sitting uneasily sitting down for dinner with his middle American family, and his daughter passing him a plate and utensils and his son passing the meatloaf as his wife looks on, unsure who she has been married to all these years.
Acting in the movie is decent, and there is plenty of action in the movie, but it is so spread out, and the final so unsettled, it just didn't seem as interesting as it could have been. With a premise like that, and as billed in the trailer, it seemed like there would have been more to the movie, and it felt like a let down.
Rated R for strong brutal violence, graphic sexuality, nudity, language and some drug use.
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