Hammer: Canuck Crime Drama Buoyed By Understatement and Solid Acting
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
You probably shouldn’t say too much about the value of understatement, except to (quietly) recommend it. Take, for example, Hammer, an 81-minute Canadian crime drama, which packs a Slinky toy’s worth of twists into its brisk run-time and a solid, unfussy performance from veteran character actor Will Patton, most recently in Halloween and the TV series, Swamp Thing.
Patton plays Stephen, a gruff, retired high-school teacher of two adult sons who have made some bad life choices.
Shot around Sault Ste Marie near the U.S. border, the film is set in a lower middle-class milieu, where good respectable folk live side-by-side with criminal neighbours, and the line between the two sometimes blurs. The film is nothing revolutionary but well-designed as it progresses through a chain of well-staged action sequences while the family backstory is layered into the mix.
The action ignites in the opening scenes, as Stephen’s oldest son, Chris — a boyish ex-felon who has been straight for a couple of years — crosses the border from the U.S. side, on route to a criminal meet-up. He’s delivering bags of cash to his more seasoned and scarier accomplice, Adams (Ben Cotton) and his girlfriend, delivering the pay-off from a drug deal.
Shortly after the successful meet-up, things go disastrously wonky. By the time it’s over, Adam is wounded, his gal pal Lori (Dayle McLeod) has been left for dead, and a bloodied Chris is fleeing for his life on a conspicuous bright red motorcycle.
It’s at that point that Chris’s dad Stephen, who is in his car idling at an intersection, witnesses his son go streaking on the bike, and gets involved. When Stephen catches up with his Chris, it’s the first time they’ve spoken in a year. Shortly after, the stakes rise sharply when the wounded Adam, out to reclaim his money and seek revenge, kidnaps Chris’s younger brother, Jeremy (Connor Price) at gunpoint.
While there are a few credibility hurdles here (including a lot of butter-fingered gunplay) Patton’s authoritative performance keeps things honest. Sporting a grizzled beard and a clownish fringe of hair around his bald pate, he’s a vanity-free puttering pensioner, communicating his deepest feelings through long pauses and awkward gestures of affection.
It’s also astute casting. Canadian director/writer Christian Sparkes (his previous film was 2014’s Cast No Shadow) shows a real aptitude for keeping exposition to a minimum while planting sufficient clues to how Stephen damaged his sons.
While the drug-deal action unfolds, parallel scenes focus on a quiet dispute between Stephen and his wife Karen (Vickie Papavs). Karen wants to move her ailing father into the estranged son’s vacant room. It’s a sore subject for Stephen, who is impervious to her pleas for compassion.
When the chips are down, though, Stephen goes into full papa bear mode, putting his life on the line for his sons though, refreshingly, there’s little suggestion of triumph in the violence. The musical score from Jeff Morrow is mournfully foreboding, without trying to pump up the suspense. Again, understated.
Hammer. Directed and written by Christian Sparkes with a story idea from Joel Thomas Hynes. Starring Will Patton, Mark O’Brien, Ben Cotton, Vickie Papavs, Connor Price, and Dayle McLeod. Available digitally on June 26.