Pun Salad

Reviewer's note: the best movie I've seen this year. So far.

The plot device is ingenious: two small-town kids run away from home, out into the rural wilderness, as kids do at times. Hiking cross-country, they come across a … police vehicle, apparently abandoned. Daring each other, they work up a foolish mutual courage. First to touch it, then to get into it, and—hey, the keys are here!—then to start it up and …

Little do the kids know (but we do, because of a flashback): the car is there because Sheriff Kevin Bacon parked it in an out-of-the-way location, the better to dispose of a body. Immediately we suspect that this is not normal good police procedure, even out in the boonies. And we're right: when he returns for his vehicle, he is nonplussed to find it not found. He immediately realizes this makes his life a whole lot more complicated, as he needs to retrieve the car, hide its loss from the inquisitive dispatcher (voiced by Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin's wife), and probably murder the kids to cover things up. Sticky!

Well, things get interesting from there. We don't learn much about anyone's back-story, and the ending is slightly ambiguous, but that's OK. I stayed awake through the whole thing, and that's getting to be my standard of quality movie-making.