River Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

River Blu-ray Movie Review

The Fugitive.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 27, 2016

The Blu-ray cover of River contains the tag line “run for your life”, which some older readers may remember was the name of a semi-popular NBC drama series which ran for a few seasons in the mid- to late sixties, a show which featured Ben Gazzara as a supposedly terminally ill guy out to have an “adventure of the week” while waiting to shuffle off this mortal coil. Run for Your Life was the brainchild of one Roy Huggins, a guy who had hit the television jackpot a year or two prior to this show’s premiere with a little series called The Fugitive, and Run for Your Life fell unmistakably into more or less the same template of the trials and tribulations of one Dr. Richard Kimball, albeit without the whole “wrongly accused of murder” angle. And in fact “the fugitive” might have served River just as well as “run for your life” does in terms of providing an apt summary, for the film is in essence nothing more than a guy on the lam after having been (yep, you guessed it) accused of a murder (the actual details of the crime won't be spoiled here). The one thing setting this generally formulaic entry apart from many at least somewhat similar outings is its setting—Laos. That gives River a rather exotic aspect that helps it to overcome some narrative hurdles as well as an overall feeling that this particular fugitive is running for his life through a series of plot mechanics that many viewers will feel like they’ve seen before.

John Lake (Rossif Sutherland, son of Donald, half-brother of Keifer) is a doctor working for a team of volunteers in Laos, and an early scene documents that he’s not exactly shy about breaking perceived rules if it means helping someone. John is obviously over worked and overstressed, and that leads to a more or less forced “vacation”, which is what sends the simple and yet too overwrought plot mechanics careening forward. At an isolated island, John visits a bar where he becomes seriously inebriated, but not so drunk that he can’t see that two other tourists are putting the moves on local women, something that John doesn’t cotton to. Later, John seemingly stumbles into the aftermath of an actual sexual assault, and chaos results, leading to the central conceit of John being accused of murder.

One of the best things about River is its sense of “other-ness”, for John is in a very real way a lost outsider, a victim of circumstance (at least in part) and a panicked American who finds himself without allies and, pointedly, without any real help from other Americans, even “officials”. That gives the film a potent paranoiac ambience that works very well, even in spite of a series of increasingly ludicrous contrivances that seem to simply arrive one after the other to keep John from ever finding safe harbor. What works against this whole premise, though, is Sutherland’s kind of weirdly tamped down emotional ambience. He has a few moments of desperate unraveling, but his general response to the chaos seems to be a kind of oddly sanguine “meh”, or at best a pained expression that seems to indicate an uncomfortable kidney stone, not a life changing series of events.

The film’s evocative locale provides plenty of color, both figurative and literal, and John’s interactions with various natives offer a rare semblance of verisimilitude in what is a generally unbelievable concept. In fact several of John’s purported motivations seem to be questionable at best and completely convenient at worst. Director Jamie M. Dagg has an eye for both the country and its inhabitants, and River succeeds as a travelogue, albeit one that most tourists probably wouldn’t want to participate in.

Dramatically the film is haphazard, lurching from vignette to vignette and ultimately defeating its hoped for build up of suspense, and part of this is precisely (or at least partly) because of Dagg's penchant for visual sidbars. In an already overextended finale, one which has already telegraphed its ultimate destination, Dagg pauses for a montage of sorts that features all kinds of local activities, including the washing of a train. We know where the train's going already, do we really need to know it was clean? That very denouement would also seem to be a dramatic detour of sorts, but it may at least give pause to those who claim that most travelers from the United States are what used to be called The Ugly American.

River Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

River is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Yet again the IMDb lacks any technical data on this shoot, but while the closing credits don't reference the Arri or Red, this has the flat, glossy look of that technology, something that aids in detail levels if also sometimes fails to support real depth in the imagery. Director Jamie M. Dagg and cinematographer Adam Marsden favor "jiggly cam", or at least a handheld approach, a lot of the time, and that shaky, unstable style gives at least the perception of a loss of detail, simply because framings are never stationary enough to allow viewers to get a good look at elements of fine detail. The two also tend to shoot into light quite a bit of the time, leading to lens flare (whether real or digitally achieved), diffuse halos surrounding faces and at times leading to a near obliteration of fine detail . In normal lighting, and with calmer camera moves, detail is quite excellent. There are a couple of longish sequences bathed in a sickly yellow color (see screenshot 10), and if not actually graded a few other moments tip toward the blue side of things, but detail levels generally remain quite high despite these stylistic flourishes. There is a minor lack of shadow definition in several darker moments (the bulk of the film seems to have been shot on the fly with only natural lighting providing illumination). There are no issues with image instability and no problematic compression anomalies to report in this review.

River Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

River features a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one which provides ample surround activity courtesy of some really nicely done ambient environmental effects, but which also finds a lot of its best side and rear activity courtesy of a pulsating score by Berlin ambient artists Troum. Dialogue (at least occasionally in French and Thai both with and without forced subtitles) is cleanly and clearly rendered, and always well prioritized. While not bombastic in a traditional sense, at least within the context of a "man on the run" thriller, this track is extremely nuanced and offers superb fidelity and above average dynamic range.

River Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:25)

River Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

River has an increasingly stifling mood that works very well indeed, and the film's locations are an eyeful, even when they're kind of dowdy and gritty, but the film never really builds up the requisite amount of suspense it needs to sustain its dramatic momentum. Sutherland is oddly unconcerned about the vagaries of fate closing in on his character, something else that tends to undercut the angst the viewer really should be experiencing. Technical merits are generally strong for those considering a purchase.