THE RECKONING

Three escaped convicts take a Tulsa family hostage in this thriller from Hunt (The Detective, 2014, etc.).

When Javier Sandoval, a big shot in the Tijeres drug cartel, promises $50,000 to a pair of rapist-murderers if they break him out of prison, crafty Richard Billie and his big-lug buddy Amos Denton are happy to oblige. The trail of corpses they leave in their wake—the prison guard they strangle, the driver whose truck they hijack, the business associate and his girlfriend they drop in on—are just gravy. Eventually they go to ground in the home of hard-case excavator Lee Coughlin, whose relationship to his daughter-in-law, Tracy, and her son, John, has been rocky ever since Drew, Lee’s son and Tracy’s husband, was killed in Iraq. As the two dysfunctional trios square off against each other, the stage is set for a series of cat-and-mouse twists. Richard and Amos are afraid Javier will take off without paying them the $50,000. Javier schemes to bring his colleagues into the picture so they can even the odds against the two guys who sprang him. Lee and Tracy, neither of whom is easily scared, have plenty to worry about as the roster of adversaries grows. Outside the house, dozens of law enforcement officials, headlined but not headed by Mike Prather of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, pick up the trail of the three convicts, who have nothing to lose by killing everyone in their path, and realize they can’t follow it any further without triggering a bloody finale.

Apart from Javier and his cartel, a surprisingly close remake of The Desperate Hours—Humphrey Bogart and Robert Middleton would be perfect as Richard and Amos, and Lee is the spitting image of Fredric March—that makes up in tension what it lacks in surprise.