A WANTED MAN
John Lake ( Rossif Sutherland) keeps trying to do the right thing. But it keeps blowing up in his face.
We first meet him tending to villagers in a makeshift hospital in Laos, enough of a do- gooder to have travelled halfway around the world to lecture villagers on their drinking. Pulled away by a truck full of wounded people, his first attempt to save one of them goes immediately south: he performs a successful amputation, but when the patient flat-lines, he refuses to give up trying to resuscitate her. His reward is to be relieved of duty for a few weeks by his no-nonsense boss.
Drinking away his frustrations on a southern island, he gets another chance to prove his moral fibre when a pair of Australians take aim at a local girl who’s too drunk to stay awake. Ushering them out, things take an even darker turn as Lake stumbles home, intervening in a potential sexual assault — by unintentionally beating said Australian to death. Or at least that’s how it seems to both his foggy memory and the local authorities, who are inclined to treat the death of a foreigner doubly seriously.
From there, Lake’s escape turns literal, and writer/director Jamie M. Dagg drags us along for the ride. Unable to sufficiently explain what happened — not that, it seems, the police would much care — he’s ducking into boats and waving fistfuls of cash at any truck that will take him. The danger of being a wanted man is only compounded by his inability to speak the language, and his sticking out like a sore thumb, making him increasingly desperate as he tries to reach the embassy and get back home.
Dagg captures this desperation and frustration well, slowing down to let us catch our breath just long enough to snatch some hope away. He always maintains the sense of fuzzy morality, and the degree to which being right is all a matter of perspective — and the more powerful the perspective, the more right there is to be had. For a movie that’s mostly chase, it’s an impressive feat: There’s more one than one reason for you to be scared for Lake’s life here. ΩΩ ½