A Single Shot Movie Review

In A Single Shot, John Moon (Sam Rockwell) is a loner.  After yet another in a long string of lost jobs, his wife takes their child and leaves John alone in his broken home, essentially a broken man. While off living on the land in West Virginia, John accidentally shoots and kills a young woman in a tragic hunting accident.

For any other film, the remainder of the screen time would unfold as John dealt with hitting rock bottom and costing this young woman her life.  Instead, John finds thousands of dollars stashed away in the deceased woman’s camp and he sees a tragic coincidence.  For John, his luck has officially changed.

Hiding the body, he decides to use this money to repair the damage his string of bad choices has wrought him.  Unfortunately, John is not the smartest man and ceases to realize that this much money rarely goes missing for too long…especially when you decide to run about town handing it out as though Christmas came early.  He begins receiving taunts and threats from an unseen element who claims to know what he did as well as what he took from them, and they want their debt repaid.

John Moon is not a sympathetic character; he makes several choices that are both selfish and dangerous.  Moon has lost his wife, child, job and is close to losing everything else…all due to a mix of a lack of intelligence and stubborn pride.  He is a man who has spent most of his days making one bad decision after another, and this series of events is essentially the apex of his life.

Seeing Sam Rockwell portray Moon, an actor known more for his charm and wit than steely-eyed stoicism, is easily the film’s strongest selling point. Using mostly his eyes and actions to convey Moon’s interior, Rockwell embodies just the right amount of silent defeatism.  He is a man beaten by life, yet unable to ever fully accept responsibility for his own role in it.  To have a character this reprehensible still warrant your empathy is something only the strongest character work could bring, and Rockwell more than proves up to the task.

The film also contains a who’s who of character actors (Jeffrey Wright, William H Macy, Melissa Leo), unfortunately to a lesser avail due mostly to screen time.  Their roles are all small, yet each acclimates themselves wholly into their West Virginia backgrounds as best as the story allows.

These smaller parts are essential to both setting up where John is in life, as well as where he is headed.  They also function as potential suspects and red herrings as Moon tries to piece together the mystery of who is taunting him and how far they are willing to go.

Where the film suffers is its plodding mid-section.  After the initial, horrific opening, the film struggles to establish what it wants to be, as well as maintain any semblance of consistent pacing.  Is it a character drama or a backwoods noir?  Director David Rosenthal tries to waver between both ideals, and unfortunately comes a little closer to the latter.  This sets up a rather formulaic end game that, while the last 20 minutes play out rather intensely, one can see the ending coming from quite a ways down the dirt road.

A Single Shot is a film I can absolutely recommend, especially for fans of Rockwell wanting to see him expand his obvious talent.  I only wish he had a stronger film to showcase this, as the film struggles a bit in the middle due to pacing and tonal issues, before a resounding and powerful conclusion.

If $10 is the full price of admission, A Single Shot is worth $5.50.