Swerve

Packs enough pace, suspense and quality thesping to overcome some minor plot wobbles.

A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.

Driven by Paul Grabowsky’s deceptively jaunty score, Swerve is ably performed and tightly paced... But it doesn’t stick the landing.

The film strains credulity as it hurtles toward its conclusion.

The fatalities and clichés escalate, as the wife plays the femme fatale, and the men run circles around one another amid the dust, blood and some tonally off, ill-conceived cutesiness.

The photogenic cast's looks far exceed their featureless performances, and any mood of sunshiny malevolence is undercut by too many studied directorial compositions.

Despite the revved-up start and a suitably dusty setting, the movie stalls almost immediately. The story is uninspired, Lyons looks lost, and Booth makes for a bland femme fatale. Clarke tries to inject some energy into the action, but even he seems to realize this ride’s going nowhere.