Movie Review: 'Midnight in the Switchgrass'

Midnight in the Switchgrass stars Emile Hirsch as Detective Crawford, an investigator for the Florida Department of Criminal Investigation. Crawford is convinced that a serial killer is operating on the outskirts of Pensacola but he can’t prove it. The local cops aren’t interested because the victims are sex workers. Also, the killer’s M.O. is inconsistent, thus proving one man was behind each of the murders proves difficult.

Crawford catches a break when, at the latest crime scene, a shady Pensacola motel, he meets a pair of FBI Agents. Megan Fox and Bruce Willis are Agents Lombard and Heller of the FBI. They’ve been tracking the same killer that Crawford believes is his guy. Heller and Lombard even had the guy set to meet them at this hotel the night before they met Crawford but they ended up leaving before he arrived, he was more than an hour late.

The killer took another victim that night and by coincidence, this change of M.O. brings Lombard and Crawford together in their suspicions. Heller is not convinced and thus he leaves the case while Lombard and Crawford perform an unsanctioned joint operation to entrap the killer at a biker bar. This doesn’t go well but I won’t spoil anything. I don’t hate Midnight in the Switchgrass enough to spoil it, though I am not writing this review to recommend it either.

Midnight in the Switchgrass is a decidedly low rent affair that somehow, money mostly, managed to wrangle a very well known cast. True, Emile Hirsch’s leading man days passed very quickly and Bruce Willis quit acting more than a decade ago, but they’re still recognizable. Then there is Megan Fox who recently appeared headed toward a career resurgence. Articles had focused on Fox of late offering a reappraisal of her career and appeared to promise better things after having been Michael Bay’s object of lust for so long.

No such luck in Midnight in the Switchgrass. This supposed thriller drags Fox right back into the B-movie morass she’d seemingly been trying to escape from. Though she’s not bad in the movie, director Randall Emmett isn’t a great director and his eagerness to linger on the torture and grossness of his killer in Midnight in the Switchgrass turns a would be thriller into far more of an exploitation movie.

Midnight in the Switchgrass is the kind of movie that you would have found at Blockbuster back in the day and wondered how it managed to have such well known stars and ended up going unnoticed, direct to video. This is strictly a product, a movie intended to appeal to prurient interests and yet features no nudity and little graphic violence. Instead, the sweaty, gross cinematography and Lukas Haas’ super-gross killer provide the nasty R-rated elements of Midnight in the Switchgrass.

Randall Emmett has made a name for himself recently by becoming the new Elie Samaha, a producer who can land relatively big stars with big paychecks and get them to make movies beneath their talent. Samaha made some truly terrible movies early in the 2000s, some of them with Bruce Willis, all of them terrible but with just the right amount of creative accounting to become modest hits.

Emmett is following a similar business model, mostly using Willis’ ever dimming star power to fool people into paying three or four bucks for a streaming rental just so they can see Willis. In turn, the movie doesn’t star Willis, despite his name at the top of the poster. He appears, he does the bare minimum of effort and hands the movie off to lesser stars. It’s a bait and switch operation for sure but if you don’t know what Willis is doing these days, and has been doing since the last Diehard movie failed, caveat emptor my friend, Buyer Beware.

Midnight in the Switchgrass is a gross, sweaty, ugly movie that occasionally held my interest. Emile Hirsch is an actor I really like and, at times, he’s able to overcome the overbearing direction and exploitation movie nastiness to make an impression. There is a movie to be made about the exploitation and murder of sex workers and the lack of interest that law enforcement tends to show in solving these murders but Midnight in the Switchgrass is not that movie. The makers of Midnight in the Switchgrass are happy to exploit human misery, suffering, and murder, but there is no intention to do anything about it.

Midnight in the Switchgrass will be available for streaming rental on Friday, July 23rd, 2021.