ASSUME NOTHING

A volatile man gets pushed to the wall once too often.

One night nine years ago, Joe Reddick of the West Palm Beach Police Department came home to find his wife and children slaughtered by an intruder. His fellow cops caught the perp, but Joe’s nightmares raged on, so he decided to make himself a new life in Los Angeles. Although Joe could escape West Palm, however, he couldn’t escape himself, and now Dana, his second wife, is about to divorce him and take their son Jake, 5, because she can’t trust his volcanic temper. That temper will be sorely tried after Joe’s car is sideswiped by a van whose driver, Andy Baumhower, is jittery because he’s been charged with getting rid of the corpse of Gillis Rainey, the squirrelly financial advisor Baumhower and his three associates in Class Act Productions—Perry Cross, Ben Clarke and Will Sinnott—had kidnapped in a futile attempt to get him to pay back the $100,000 he’d taken from them before they had to repay their even bigger debt to druglord Jorge Lizama, Jr. Naturally, the Class Act partners feel they can’t risk the chance that Reddick might remember his brush with Baumhower at the wrong moment and go to the cops. But Clarke picks exactly the wrong way of insuring that he won’t: breaking into his home and threatening him and his wife and son. Reddick, who has no intention of losing a second family to violence, decides to take matters into his own hands, and by the time the curtain comes down, the cast will have been decimated, much to the gentle reader’s righteous satisfaction. An efficient noir actioner that’s also a sharp study of a hero who “wasn’t an evil man, just an astoundingly unfortunate one.”