When you have a character say, “Logging is the deadliest profession in the world by a factor of 30,” a film is implicitly making a contract with the audience for at least one death by log, and the new action drama Clear Cut, co-starring Alec Baldwin and Stephen Dorff, at least obliges in that regard. But there’s unfortunately not much else to recommend this slapdash low-budget affair, which treads familiar terrain and does so without much distinguishing flair or skill.

It’s perhaps true that Clear Cut, set in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, doesn’t necessarily take itself too seriously (in its credits it’s billed as “a Brian Skiba flick”), and that’s a good thing. But it’s also kind of a mess from the beginning, and put together in a way that highlights rather than artfully conceals some of its many shortcomings.
The movie’s opening has a heavy horror movie vibe that doesn’t really match the rest of the film’s tone, as a guy who later turns out to be meth cooker Bo (Lochlyn Munro) stalks and kills a young woman for reasons that aren’t really entirely clear.
In short order, though, viewers meet two other groups of people. There’s 
Sam (Alec Baldwin), a veteran lumberjack who’s ready to show newbie Jack (Clive Standen) the ropes on his first day on the job. As this duo make their way deeper into the woods, they come across Ike (Stephen Dorff), a ranger who’s also an old friend of Sam’s. There’s also another group who meet up with Bo, consisting of Eli (Jesse Metcalfe), Keen (Tom Welling), and Jasmine (Chelsey Reist).

Before long, there’s a drug deal gone wrong, and some parties end up dead. The movie slowly metes out details of Jack’s tragic past with wife Becca (Lucy Martin) and their five-year-old daughter Maddie (Kamaria Willow Purdy), as well as the events which have led him to seek work in a dangerous field in which he has no previous experience or particular connection. After Jack comes across a bag of money, it sets off a chain reaction of chase and increasingly bloody conflict.
Cinematographer Gabriel Medina grabs what he can of the natural backdrops, but is mostly undone by the cramped framing and unsophisticated instincts of director Skiba. Working from a screenplay by Joe Perruccio, Skiba also serves as his own editor, delivering a jumble of often at-odds material. Subpar stunts and action choreography certainly don’t help, either.
Most of the acting gives off a pungent vibe of disinterestedness. Dorff and Baldwin, though, two seasoned performers, know how to sneak in a couple smart, less-is-more moments. Even if the latter is a little too paunchy to portray a working logger, he brings a pro’s-pro sensibility to several scenes: the introductory sequence in which Sam sizes up Jack has a nice good ol’ boy, training day vibe, and makes one yearn for a more streamlined, less action-oriented movie that just let us sink in with a couple of these characters.

Of course, smart dialogue and carefully crafted characters require a greater level of craftsmanship than hastily choreographed action, and presumably is a lot more difficult to sell in ancillary markets, too. So we get the action — lots of action. And that means, mostly, that Clear Cut unfolds merely as an escalating series of “LOL”s, by which I mean overwhelmingly dubious choices, running the gamut from character-related to editorial decisions, that combine to give the entire proceeding the feeling of a living instructional document on how not to make a movie.
To wit, this list includes Bo tossing his loaded crossbow to another character, not under duress; Jack, perhaps in order to save the trouble of having to match a stunt double, theatrically knocking off his own hat before scampering off into the woods during an abbreviated chase sequence; characters making the decision to dispose of a dead body by burning it directly in front of a mobile home that is allegedly a meth lab; and one action sequence featuring Jack stealing a truck, immediately crashing into a tree, and then drifting off into a hazy sex-scene flashback before then coming to and getting into a fistfight. Wild stuff, truly.
Skiba is a prolific genre filmmaker, with Clear Cut incredibly representing his tenth movie behind the camera in the last four years. But part of being a talented “shooter,” in the parlance of the industry, is using economic shortcuts to maximize the type of budget restrictions virtually every production faces.

Our Rating

Summary
Clear Cut is a movie that, even though it’s not particularly original, commits loads of unforced mistakes, pulling a viewer out of its story. There are continuity errors galore (Dorff returns to the site of a fire and massive explosion, which is given only the most cursory treatment of partially blackened ground), and many other moments of cringe-y embarrassment that could have been reduced in the hands of a more skilled director.