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With: Thomas Jane, Emile Hirsch, Liana Liberato, Harlow Jane, Makana David, Diego Romero, Michael Vincent Berry, Arthur Rodriguez, Ramona DuBarry, Ashleigh Domangue, Nick Check
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Written by: Banipal Ablakhad, Benhur Ablakhad
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Directed by: K. Asher Levin
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MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, some sexual content and brief drug use
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Running Time: 89
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Date: 09/23/2022
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Dirt Cheap
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
The generic thriller Dig has its moments, but it struggles to come up with reasons to keep the four main characters together, and to retain the balance of power, and it stumbles all too frequently.
Scott Brennan (Thomas Jane) goes looking for his errant teen daughter Jane (Harlow Jane) and finds her in a sleazy bar. While arguing on the way home, the family nearly gets into an accident; when Brennan confronts the other driver, his wife is shot and killed, and Jane loses her hearing. A year later, father and daughter are trying to cope. A stranger, Vic (Emile Hirsch), approaches Brennan at his salvage company and offers him a lucrative job. At an abandoned house in the desert, he is to dig up the patio and help recover something buried underneath.
Brennan brings Jane along on the job, and they accidentally discover more money, lots of it, hidden in the walls of the house. Before long, two masked figures, really Vic and his girlfriend Lola (Liana Liberato), show up and hold Brennan and Jane at gunpoint. Brennan knows that they will stay alive as long as they keep digging, but can he eventually find a way to get himself and his daughter out safely?
From the film's first moments, which depict Brennan and Jane's life-changing tragedy, scenes are shaped in ways that make you frustrated with the rash, unthinking actions of the characters, rather than generating sympathy. We're further frustrated by their silly, futile attempts to escape from Vic and Lola, never having much of a plan; even the final moments feel somehow unfinished and unsatisfying.
For their part, Vic and Lola are like a low-budget version of Mickey and Malory from Natural Born Killers, expressing their psychotic love for each other and cracking jokes over their fresh kill. Both Hirsch and Liberato wildly overact in their roles, a poor decision for such a small-scale movie that would have benefitted from subtlety.
Thomas Jane's real-life daughter Harlow Jane does a fine job as "Jane" (honestly... couldn't the writers have changed the character's name?) and offering a likable portrayal as a deaf character — her use of lip-reading and ASL fits into the plot — although perhaps considering an actual member of the deaf and hard of hearing community for the role would have been preferable.
All in all, Dig might have been a tense, small-scale chess game, but instead it just winds up in the dirt.
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