Mercury Plains (2016)

Elevator Pitch: A young man, Mitch, in South Texas goes across the border into Mexico with a friend for a night out, but the friend fails to pay for a prostitute and abandons Mitch to the violent reprisal which occurs. He is picked out of the gutter by another young man and encouraged to join a group of youths led by “The Captain”, who once trained will target drug cartels, for what they can get. After a couple of fire fights the second of which is with the federales two of the gang have been killed and the location of their hideout revealed to the police. In an atmosphere of increasing danger and violence Mitch must find a way of escaping, preferably with the money.

Content: The Captain has a girlfriend, with whom Mitch has sex on one occasion in the dark. There is quite a bit of drinking, Mitch gets through about eight beers while his friend is with the hooker. Once he joins the gang there is a boot camp, and an altercation results in him being briefly imprisoned. In the botched attacks there is quite a bit of gunfire, the gang mainly having second hand pistols and the opposition machine guns and shot guns. There are a couple of car chases and we find out why The Captain  had them dig a ditch.

A View: I was stunned to find that there had not been a Rotten Tomatoes review of this movie. No critics had seen it, there is no Content Advisory and only one Trivia item on IMDb. One amateur critic was quite rude about the horse, which looked fine to me, and I know a bit about horses. Scott Eastwood has come in for some criticism as well, but maybe it was the director who tried a bit too hard to make him an image of his dad. But honestly I have seen worse, so probably a watch for nothing while you are doing something else.

Additional Info: According to the director “Mercury Plains” is the land just south of the border in Mexico – an epic landscape.