Above-Average Joe

JOE (B-minus) - I'm glad that David Gordon Green makes movies. Case in point: Last year's little gem "Prince Avalanche."

However, his latest, the Nicolas Cage vehicle "Joe," is a shaky southern-gothic fable. Joe's a former felon who runs a rural Texas crew with a unique task: They go through a stretch of forest poisoning trees (with hatchets hooked up to portable pumps they carry on their back), so that the owner of the land can come in after the trees die and plant strong pines. (The gig echoes the work done by the duo in "Prince Avalanche," who were re-striping a rural road in Texas.)

Teenage Gary (Tye Sheridan from "Mud") stumbles across the crew, and finds a surrogate father to replace his no-good-bum boozin', violent, cheatin' dad. Gary's a hard worker who, based on a clunky merging of images, reminds Joe of his young self, only with a brighter future. Joe's quite the chain-smoker with a persistent cough, and you get a hunch that the hacking might be behind his reckless death wish.

Too often, the proceedings degrade into amateur night at a Sling Blade karaoke competition. Most of the men mumble, to the point where key snippets of dialogue get lost. The work crew is mostly black, and they are nothing more than props here. The women are just abused things, kind hookers and other victims of the war between the bubbas. (Gee, why doesn't Gary's sister ever speak?)  Only the white men -- the two main good guys and the two main good guys -- have a modicum of depth to them.

Still, Green's cast sticks to the shallow end. Struggling with an ordinary script by journeyman Gary Hawkins (based on a novel by Larry Brown), Cage and the gang just don't have the chops to make this yokel-fest quite believable. Cage can't help letting his superhero persona bleed into the gritty gloom. (Do we need yet another scene where the tough guy pours whiskey on his gunshot wound and digs out the bullet himself? Or a bloody dogfight?) Why, there's nothing Joe can't do -- step aside, mousy foreigner with accent, and let the big man slice the meat off that deer hanging in your living room! Grown men a-feared of snakes? Joe'll manhandle that rascally rattler.

The film does find some footing and brightens up briefly at the start of the second half, when Joe and Gary (finally slipping into a comfortable rapport) take a daylight jaunt looking for a lost dog. But the scene is an outlier. Green does better when the sun's out. Here he continues his communal connection to nature, lingering over stately trees, chirpy birds and dappled sunlight.

The final half hour slips back into darkness. Cage's shtick wears thin. The evil dad conspires with Joe's nemesis (you can tell he's a villain, because he has scars on his face). Gary sees his chance to escape this brutal life. (Sheridan, so brilliant in "Mud" is a disappointment here, as flat as his accent.) Green loses his grip on the sloppy plot.

Who will survive when the shooting subsides and flashing lights arrive in the dead of night? Sadly, it doesn't matter much. Green's lovely coda (a beautiful movie ending if there ever was one) is wasted tacked on to an average film.