The Desperate Hour (2022) Review!!

Synopsis – Unfolding in real time, THE DESPERATE HOUR is a “riveting and pulse pounding” thriller from award-winning director Phillip Noyce. Recently widowed mother Amy Carr (Academy Award®-nominee Naomi Watts) is doing her best to restore normalcy to the lives of her young daughter and teenage son in their small town. As she’s on a jog in the woods, she finds her town thrown into chaos as a shooting takes place at her son’s school. Miles away on foot in the dense forest, Amy desperately races against time to save her son.

My Take – Joining the growing list of films like Buried (2010), Locke (2013), and The Guilty (2021), which sees a single character dealing and solving their dilemmas for the entirety of a run time by just being on a phone is this latest from director Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, The Bone Collector, Salt) and writer Chris Sparling (Buried, Greenland).

Right off the film, formerly titled Lakewood, dutifully adheres to its high-stakes, high-risk, task-oriented single-day format. And considering the concept in place, the film seemed well set to do something original and creative with its premise.

Unfortunately, whatever expectations the film sets up, quickly goes down the drain. With a scattershot script in hand, that is sloppy at best and shameful at worst, absurd character decisions and massive leaps in logic taking pace, both director Noyce and writer Sparling poorly handle the turning of the school shooting issue into a suspense thriller.

While there is no denying of the fact that Naomi Watts, who also a producer on this, is a superb actress, and seems to be giving it all in her performance here. But film simply just doesn’t seem to possess the substance to a create high-stakes suspense, much less sustain it for 84 minutes, mainly as the plot is poorly conceived and the execution flawed.

But if you’re fine with watching a feature focused on Watts looking worried, walking, running, limping and talking in front of trees, well I guess this one is for you.

The story follows Amy Carr (Naomi Watts), a widow who is still grieving the loss of her husband who passed away a year ago. With the impending anniversary close, Amy takes a personal day from work, packs her elementary age daughter Emily (Sierra Maltby) off on the school bus, and attempts to rouse her depressed son Noah (Colton Gobbo) from his bed, and heads into the remote woods near their hometown for a peaceful run.

Unfortunately she keeps getting interrupted as her phone keeps ringing off the hook. Ranging calls from her daughter’s school to a friend organizing a moms’ night out to her parents who are flying in the same day.

But when Amy eventually sets her phone to do not disturb mode, an emergency alert from the local police department pops through, informing about an ongoing incident taking place at her son’s school, sending her whole life into a frenzy.

Of course, during Amy’s desperate hour, she runs up against just about every obstacle you could imagine. She can’t reach Noah, her Lyft driver keeps getting stuck in traffic and it turns out that the police are investigating her son as a suspect. And if you think that sounds thrilling, it’s not, especially when it’s easy to guess the development about the supposed ongoing incident.

It is surprising considering both director Noyce and writer Sparling have the ability to deliver tension, and try to squeezes out every possible trick to keep us interested. Like the high, overhead shots of Amy running through colorful trees and shots of her looking upward from the dirt path. The camera sometimes swirls around her face like a wasp and ominous music swells.

But what follows is just about Amy’s mental and physical ordeal as she responds to the news and tries to reach the school. The whole time she acts as though it’s not an option for her to go home and get her car, instead desperately calling anyone she can think of to ask for a ride, clogging up the phone lines, including her daughter’s teacher and even, several times, 911.

Not only is that particularly enthralling, but it also defies all basic reasoning and common sense, as Amy’s desire to have immediate knowledge trumps any other concern in this story.

It is too dependent on the traumatic resonance of school shootings to create urgency and dread, and just unwilling to deal with the realities involved. The film saves its final push for social-ills relevance with an execrable credits scene depicting a character’s social-media video, how this has to stop and they won’t stay quiet.

But even that feels misleading as the video is never actually specific about what happened, what the issue is, and what the politics of it are, at least not in the way a scarred trauma survivor would probably articulate.

Nevertheless, Naomi Watts is committed to the substandard material and does practically all of the heavy lifting. She excels at desperation and confusion, and she knows how to show naked, raw fragility while disclosing an iron inner strength that’s almost frightening.

It’s a shame that the script presents her with so many unnecessary roadblocks but her performance is strong enough to get through most of them. In smaller roles, young actors Colton Gobbo and Sierra Maltby are alright. On the whole, ‘The Desperate Hour’ is a tedious and dull real time thriller dominated by clichés.