‘Midnight in the Switchgrass’: An Unmemorable Thriller Whose Main Mystery Is What Just Happened

Tony Sokol

Lukas Haas plays more than the main suspect in director Randall Emmett’s serial killer investigation procedural “Midnight in the Switchgrass.” He is its symbol. Serial killers are always the guys who live in the neighborhood you’d never expect, we were taught. They seem like regular people. You’d never suspect them. Hell, neighbors barely remember them. Haas plays Peter Hillborough like the truck driving teen prostitute slayer is anything but normal, accentuating the sinister, eliminating any trace of innocence. But we still don’t remember this is the guy we’re supposed to be watching from one scene to the next. Like the film itself, his essence is so nondescript, we have to be reminded of what he just did. We know who the killer is from the beginning of the film. We don’t retain that knowledge, but after a few overt reminders, it sticks.

Second-billed star Bruce Willis sits in on this movie for what can most generously be called a cameo. His FBI agent Karl Helter sits in a booth at a diner, a stool on a bar, a chair in a restaurant, and the driver’s seat while Megan Fox’s Agent Rebecca Lombardo goes off on life-threatening assignments. He is seated on foam upholstery when he visits his partner in a hospital room. Helter doesn’t even roll down his window when the film’s most visible victim, Tracey Lee (Caitlin Carmichael), does a zombie perp walk out of a motel room and in front of his car at a gas station. It is such a comfortable performance, Willis could have been sitting in for someone else, almost anyone else. But there were moments I checked to see if he could break contract from the position to be sure he wasn’t playing a ghost tied to the position he was in when he died, like he was tied to the clothes he was wearing when stabbed in “The Sixth Sense.”

Emile Hirsch’s state cop Byron Crawford is a nice guy who finishes third in billing, but probably gets the most screen time. He is a hardworking officer who is being forced to halt his investigation into a series of disappearances and killings in and around Pensacola, Florida. Young women are being abducted, raped, killed, and left on display in the woods. They all have the same pattern of bite marks on their bodies, and he’s the only person who sees the connections. Most of the victims are truck-stop hookers. This means most cops don’t take the deaths seriously, and even Crawford’s superior wants to reassign him off the case. 

It feels like women disappear on a daily basis in Pensacola. You can’t pee against a billboard without running into a discarded body in a random field. When Lieutenant Gilbright (Donovan Carter) pulls Crawford off the missing-women case, no real explanation is given, nor really expected. But Crawford, a god-fearing man who personally breaks bad news to grieving mothers like Ms. Kellogg (Welker White), feels he owes those ladies justice. “You know nobody has ever stood up for those girls, and I just can’t seem to reconcile that no more,” Crawford explains with the haughty self-righteousness of a southern good boy.

Crawford is so noble he doesn’t realize his wife is going out of her mind waiting for him to get home. Even the villain, Peter, offers to quit his job the very first time his wife complains he’s spending too much time at work. He takes time out from his game of bind-and-torture-and-kill to play with his daughter, a frighteningly cute little girl who spends her evenings counting the stars in the sky, and inadvertently acting as guard dog to her daddy’s potential prey at bay. Crawford isn’t the most eagle-eyed investigator south of the Mason-Dixon line. It only takes one round for him to lose Lombardo in a dangerous undercover stakeout in a bar where he sticks out like a sore thumb. At least we recognize him.

“Lions are born knowing they are predators, antelopes understand that they are prey, humans are the only creatures on Earth given a choice,” Crawford says in the opening voiceover. Written by Alan Horsnail, “Midnight in the Switchgrass,” never chooses the kind of film it wants to be. It is too lazy to be formulaic and  too superficial to be a character study. Sure, it’s a detective melodrama, but it’s also a sadomasochistic voyeur study, fetishizing every chain, cuff, and needle to tease flesh. Poor Megan Fox doesn’t know whether to welcome her collar or book it when he comes within biting distance.

Rebecca’s assignment is to entrap a sex offender she’s been catfishing online, but keeps reeling in low-level pimps like Calvin (Colson Baker, aka Machine Gun Kelly), who go out of their way to offend everyone. Fox gives a restrained performance, with only glimpses of any kinds of comradery she may share with her partner. We get the most information out of her when she tells the pimp to get out of town. He gives a sob story. She gives a worse sob story. “We all got excuses,” she says.

The film doesn’t care about Lombardo. All we know is her partner thinks she’s reckless and tough. Helter and Crawford at least have marriages they are screwing up, and even the killer gets a backstory and family support. When Lombardo meets Tracey’s sister, Heather (Sistine Stallone), she gets tongue-tied, neither asking anything useful about the case nor revealing a single detail about the character. Helter has gone his entire tenure with Detective Lombardo, but he’s never asked about her life. 

For a cop movie, there isn’t much investigation going on in the film, and psychological profiling only gets lip service. We never doubt Lombardo and Tracey will be found. It never builds enough suspense and is not that kind of movie. “Midnight in the Switchgrass” is loosely based on a real-life serial killer called “The Truck Stop Killer,” but it doesn’t give the impression it has any connection to reality. It barely makes any impression at all.

“Midnight in the Switchgrass” releases July 23 on VOD and in select theaters