Stephanie (Amber Heard) and her best friend Ellie (Odette Yustman; Cloverfield,
The Unborn) are both visiting Argentina on a bike tour through the back country.
Stephanie is wrestling with a problem she has with a cheating boyfriend,
wondering whether she should take him back. Ellie, meanwhile, is a party girl
who’s determined to get herself and Stephanie killed anyway and anyhow she can
while on this trip. Eventually, Ellie’s abducted by slavers. After getting
nowhere with the local police, it’s now up to the sensible Stephanie to
try and track down where her dopey friend disappeared to.
Although this ‘American tourists in trouble’ storyline may be reminiscent of the more recent Turistas, And Soon The Darkness is actually a remake of a forty year old British film by the same name. Whereas that one detailed the adventures of a pair of a British women in France, the action has been moved this time to Argentina. Not having seen the original, I can’t say just how good the remake is in comparison. But, standing on its own, the remake is a pretty lame movie in its own right. Although it’s only ninety minutes long, the film’s pacing dragged at such a slow crawl that I seriously thought about giving up on it about halfway through.
Carl Urban, who was so good as Doctor McCoy in the recent Star Trek reboot, also stars here as the official red herring guy. He’s the only other American in the small village where Stephanie and Ellie are spending the night, and he really has nothing to do but look concerned and worried all the time--as well as be just suspicious enough for Stephanie to consider to be a suspect. In addition to having the women act incredibly stupid--Ellie all but invites trouble in a local bar; while Stephanie later gets mad and runs off, leaving Ellie alone, all by herself, in a countryside neither of them know their way around--the storyline itself is also very predictable.
I mean, the film is predictable to the point that it pretty much wound up being
exactly how I figured it would turn out. There were no surprises whatsoever here.
When even the plot twist in a movie are predictable, you know you’re in trouble.
And while things finally heat up within the last half hour, it’s all directly in
an oddly bland, detached style. It’s almost as if the director was simply going
through the motions, hitting all of the beats, and just getting all the shots he
needs without injecting the film with any sense of style, drama or even suspense.
If you’re looking for a more enjoyable, and suspenseful, version of the American
Tourists in trouble story, give Turistas a shot instead.
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