Movie Review: School Shooting Thriller 'The Desperate Hour' is Bad and in Bad Taste

Phillip Noyce’s reviled drama, Lakewood is finally getting a release under a new title, The Desperate Hour. The film which debuted as Lakewood at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021 was met with a torrent of bad reviews before quietly creeping into the shadows and out of any possible awards contention. Now titled The Desperate Hour, the Naomi Watts led thriller is getting a limited and rather low-key theatrical release.

The Desperate Hour is one of those movies made during the COVID-19 pandemic and needed to find ways to film without risking cast and crew-wide infections. Thus, the story centers on one character for 84 minutes alone in a forest. But that’s not what the movie is about. Instead, The Desperate Hour is about a school shooting that unfolds via an all powerful IPhone that gets reception everywhere and never runs out of a charge until it’s needed for dramatic effect.

The Desperate Hour stars Naomi Watts as Amy Carr, super-mom of two kids. Amy is taking a personal day from her unspecified job and efforting to get her layabout son, Noah (Colton Gobbo), off his back and on his way to school. Noah has been growing distant and depressed since the death of his father not long before the story of this movie unfolds. Not waiting around for Noah to get up, Amy heads out for a jog so the plot can kick in.

While jogging some five miles from her home, Amy receives an alert from Noah’s school that the school is on a lockdown. In fact, all the local schools are on a lockdown and the rumors have started to spread regarding an active shooter. Being closer to the school than she is to home, Amy begins to run in the direction of the school, an hour long walk away through forest trails. Along the way Amy keeps her phone humming with calls to friends, fellow moms, and the police via a very friendly exposition 911 operator.

The story kicks up a notch when a Police Detective contacts Amy and begins asking probing questions about Noah and his mental state. Does the family own guns? Yes, does Noah know how to use guns? Yes, his dad took him hunting? How well secured are those guns? They are locked up but Amy hasn’t looked at them in months to see if the lock or the cabinet has been disturbed. The detective won’t confirm anything but this combined with Noah not answering her repeated calls leaves Amy to worry that he’s involved.

I won’t spoil where the story goes from here, even as I don’t recommend seeing The Desperate Hour. I like Naomi Watts enough that I don’t want to completely remove the chance that you see this movie. Watts delivers a very tough performance in a very bad idea of a movie. Credit to Watts for giving her all in a movie where she is the only person on screen for the majority of the movie. It’s quite the acting challenge and one made even more difficult by director Phillip Noyce who undermines his star at every turn.

Phillip Noyce is a very talented director with the right material. His Rabbit Proof Fence and The Quiet American are smart, exceptionally well crafted movies. However, Noyce is also known for crafting exploitative, tawdry and downright terrible thrillers. Movies such as The Bone Collector, Sliver, and Above Suspicion demonstrate craftsmanship but fail spectacularly due to Noyce’s taste for the broad and vulgar side of thriller filmmaking.

The Desperate Hour is all wrong because it completely misunderstands how most Americans see School Shootings. School Shootings are a grievous tragedy that we collectively have yet to come to terms with. The deaths of children in school shootings are not tools for melodrama. The subject requires care and good taste and thoughtfulness. Noyce treats the school shooting at the heart of The Desperate Hour as a vehicle for a thriller and ignores the tragedy in favor of executing the plot of a popcorn thriller. It’s a horrific miscalculation at best and offensively tone deaf in the kindest reading of Noyce’s intentions.

A school shooting is the exact wrong vehicle for a thriller plot. A grave serious drama is questionable in the hands of a Hollywood filmmaker but a thriller is an egregious affront to taste. The Desperate Hour would be gimmicky and struggling without the school shooting. With that as the driving force behind the plot, it’s downright offensive. Nevertheless, The Desperate Hour, formerly known as Lakewood, will be getting a limited theatrical release as of February 25th, 2022.