REVIEW: ‘Hammer’ dismantles a family via crime and neglect
Will Patton and Mark O’Brien star in Hammer, directed by Christian Sparkes.
When we talk about crime, it’s often described as a force that destroys families. There’s the violence against the victims and their loved ones, but also against the innocent relatives of the perpetrators. One action can pull dozens of people into its orbit.
Thousands of movies over the years have explored these dynamics, but there’s a strikingly methodical quality to how it’s depicted in the new release Hammer, which just hit VOD services a week ago. The impact of the crimes committed by the characters feels more like an organized demolition of the central family unit; not a random, chaotic incident but the brutally logical result of the characters’ actions.
Hammer is written and directed by Christian Sparkes and based on a story by Sparkes and Joel Thomas Hynes. Shot in Ontario and Newfoundland, Canada, the precise setting is left vague, though we intuit it could be on either side of the American/Canadian border. Other details about the premise are just as sparse: Chris Davis (Mark O’Brien) is smuggling bags of cash across the border. He and his younger brother have crushing debts to an unknown figure or organization, and we discover that both men dabbled in small-time drug dealing in the past few years.
But before Chris can hand off the cash to his initial contact (Ben Cotton), he conspires to take the money for himself. This sparks a headlong race for survival where the money goes missing, a woman is left for dead, and Chris’ family is slowly taken apart, one bad choice at a time.
The central duo in the movie is Chris and his father Stephen (Will Patton), a retired teacher. Chris, clad in sweatpants and a dirty T-shirt, looks like he was kicked out of bed and forced to flee for his life. O’Brien has played similarly overwhelmed and nervy characters before, but this time there’s a bit of Adam Sandler’s Uncut Gems antihero Howard Ratner present: a man convinced that his next play is all he needs to get out of the deepening pit he’s dug for himself. The tragic part is that Chris doesn’t aspire to the wealth and glamour captured in Uncut Gems - he just wants to make a clean break, and even that might be beyond his grasp.
By contrast, Stephen is a portrait of patient anguish - he just wants his sons to better themselves, but he’s utterly confused about how they went so wrong. He suspects that it’s because he and his wife Karen (Vickie Papavs) shunned Chris after his last arrest, but he barely has time to contemplate any of it before jumping to Chris’ side. I haven’t seen much of Patton’s work since his role in Remember the Titans, of all things, but he, too, is a good fit for this material. Patton’s face reflects those of people you might see on the evening news, shaking their heads as they wrestle with how their kid could end up committing some violent act.
We see flashes of the town where these men live, a single-industry sort of place that might be in the kind of downturn that pushes young men like Chris and his brother to petty crime. But one location that Hammer returns to is a field of corn. Chris says he hid the money and his injured accomplice (Dayle McLeod) there, and at first, it’s nothing but a maze. The money and the accomplice do turn up, but first they find a snake on the ground, consuming itself. It’s the one moment of surreal imagery in an otherwise sober thriller, but it lends the movie a bit of Twin Peaks-ian dread, as if there’s something about the landscape driving people to self-destruct.
At a zero-fat 81 minutes, Hammer could have easily tacked on more set pieces or characters. But I appreciate the confidence of movies that cut themselves short. Part of me already suspects that these characters aren’t heading anywhere good when the credits roll; an open ending gives the tiniest bit of hope that the appropriate justice will be served, and the Davis family will endure. In Hammer’s eerily plausible world, the chances are slim.
Hammer gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
I’m curious about the decision to blend footage of the two provinces. They both have very different landscapes - was it an aesthetic choice, or just more economical for the production?
O’Brien has a knack for characters who start out good but end up as adversaries; check out his roles as the fiancé in Ready or Not or as the military officer in Arrival.