Blackway is an adaptation of the book titled Go With Me, which I did not know before watching it. Blackway is about a woman, played by Julia Styles, who returns to her old town to make a home only to discover that one man, the titular character, played by Ray Liotta, can terrorize the logging town and her with impunity. The woman begins a search to find someone willing to stop Blackway then to find Blackway to deliver justice. Blackway heavily relies on its stars, Styles and Anthony Hopkins, to carry the film, and they do an admirable job, but once you have seen Ray Liotta play a bad guy, including in Unlawful Entry, I knew which direction the film was going. I almost stopped watching after the first seven minutes because I saw a cat and correctly predicted its fate. I was not even upset.
I wanted to see Blackway after seeing Misconduct and realizing that Hopkins and Styles were the most interesting part of the film. Blackway is a lackluster movie that relies on its interesting elements to make a good movie, but it never comes together. Blackway fails to evoke a sinister atmosphere though it tries by showing grown burly men being cowered by Liotta, animals being treated poorly and very few female characters that are not being exploited. Blackway is trying to evoke a community after the fall, but it just felt heavy-handed.
Blackway exploits the twenty-first century trend of setting a crime thriller in the Pacific Northwest: The Frozen Ground and Insomnia. Filmmakers must think that the inhospitable and bleak atmosphere will do most of the work that the cliché-ridden script does not, but that is a mistake since Blackway is visually flat. Rather late in the film, Blackway tries to evoke a Roanoke mythos about the town, but this concept is introduced too late in the film then goes nowhere.
Blackway also combines the Western with film noir, but no one is really a stranger in the town. The character that is closest to an outsider is Styles’ character who can compare and contrast what the town was like and what it has become whereas the other characters are like the proverbial frog in a pot that gradually gets hot until it is boiling. Blackway tries to evoke Unforgiven, but again waits too long to reference what Hopkins character may have been like in the past. We know that Hopkins was Hannibal Lecter, but Thomas Harris did not write Go With Me so Blackway needed to lay the groundwork earlier to effectively suggest that Hopkins and Blackway were suitable foils.
Blackway uses flashbacks late in the movie to depict Styles and Hopkins’ motivations for facing down Blackway, but compared to the other terrible events that happen in the film, it is anticlimactic. You had me at beheading a cat. Being mean after a funeral even with the sinister implication that Blackway was responsible for the funeral taking place did nothing for me. After the motel scene, I already figured what out what happened, and the flashback was too little, too late.
Blackway is ultimately a lazy movie that relies on tropes and talent to make an interesting story, but instead just makes a disappointingly predictable one. Unless you are an extreme fan of one of the actors in the cast, skip Blackway.
Side note: it is a little on the nose to call the villain Blackway. Get it, Black Way! The community has taken a dark turn or a Black Way if you get it. Yes, we get it. Leave me alone.