Big Sky (2015)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Hazel (Bella Thorne) suffers from debilitating agoraphobia. Her mother Dee (Kyra Sedgwick) takes her to a desert treatment center. She is transported in a box inside a van along with other passengers. Suddenly, the van is attacked by sibling bandits and a girl is kidnapped. In order to save her dying mother, Hazel faces her fears to find help.Not enough happens to make this thrilling. The characters are split up. They set up something but more needs to be done with it. It climaxes with a convoluted Mexican standoff. Much of it is unreasonable but mostly, it lacks tension or thrills.

From thequickflickcritic.blogspot.com/ I am forever a sucker for movies set in the wide open expanse of the American west. This penchant is what sucked me into seeing the low budget dramatic thriller "Big Sky".Now admittedly I don't know what severe agoraphobia looks like. But I imagine that Bella Thorne does a pretty damn good job of depicting how this insidious psychological affliction debilitates and paralyzes those who can not bear interaction with the outside world. And Kyra Sedgwick as her less-than-model yet loving mom and the consummate acting pro is first-rate despite being rendered incapacitated early on in the proceedings. There's your propers, kids. The rest of "Big Sky" is so implausible, inexplicable or just downright impossible it loses it's way pretty quickly, never to regain any true traction.Make it a big whiff on "Big Sky".

Not good. Spoiler!OK, we understand you have issues... being agoraphobic and all,.. but, as soon as you see people, you gotta tell them quickly that your mom got shot.I don't know if there are people like this. She walks slowly, yeah, OK, because she's afraid being outside.But when seeing the first real person, she acts like "Oh, look! A shirtless village idiot! Is he real or a mirage! Oh, he's real all right, and he says he's got a bike. Looks like he's stone and he's blabbering about someone named Eve. Let's entertain him and I will just limp along...Hey, waitaminute... I am not agoraphobic anymore!" Urgh... If you still want to check it out, be my guest. Don't say I didn't warn you.Unless, you have insomnia!

When I read the description for Big Sky, I jumped all over it. I love a good survival thriller and the cast sounded good and the concept sounded like it couldn't possibly go wrong. Of course this is an indie film appealing to critics and artsy types so I should have known it would be anything but conventional. Big Sky is slow. That is the biggest issue with it. It is some sort of character study focusing on a young girl with a lot of mental health issues like agoraphobia and Obsessive Compulsive disorder trying to survive and get help after her mother and co-travellers are shot and left for dead by some criminals. The plot is really a mess and nothing really makes a lot of sense and a lot of plot points are left unanswered including (unless I dozed off and missed it) the entire point of why the gunman are doing this. At the very least the makers of this owe the audience a decent explanation as to the motive for this brutal crime and you get nothing. The characters are very underdeveloped and empty and the best thing about the film are that the two main characters are played by strong actresses and the setting of the desert actually adds an element of intrigue to it.Bella Thorne plays the agoraphobic girl heading to a treatment centre. Thorne was really terrific in Blended last year and since then she seems to be popping up everywhere. This might have been a decent role for her but the characters are really poorly written. Still Thorne is good enough to keep your attention and she tries to utilize what they give her as best as possible. Kyra Sedgwick is her Mom who has been shot and desperately fight for her life. Sedgwick is appropriately intense and certainly tries her best as well. She has good chemistry with Thorne and without them this film would have been a total fail. Frank Grillo and Aaron Tveit are completely wasted as the "bad guys." They have this bizarre relationship and a complex back and forth between them but there is no background given and we don't understand their motives and Grillo should have been given far more to work with as he is a great character actor.Jorge Michel Grau has had a few small credits to his name and I'm sorry to say that this does nothing for his name. There isn't even a style that I can speak to here and I think he doesn't handle his cast well at all. I'm not even sure how I sat through it for so long but I had to know how it would end because naturally I assumed all the answers left outstanding would be solved and they aren't. The ending is strange and out there and leaves you feeling completely unsatisfied. For a film that reads really well it ends up feeling more like a letdown. It isn't a thriller or a drama and I'm not sure where it belongs. Its a dud unfortunately. 4/10