Following an unfortunate encounter with the police, a group of punks hides out in a cabin in the woods, where an inexplicably murderous park ranger hunts them down one by one. If ever a movie had a generic logline, Jenn Wexler’s “The Ranger” is it. However, while Wexler’s film is weighed down by its overly-generic (in the truest sense of the word “generic”) second act, it is distinguished from the slasher pack by a splendidly punk-rock opening and a satisfying conclusion, not to mention great performances through and through.
“The Ranger” opens with the crack of a gunshot echoing through a dense forest. We go then to the edge of a cliff, where a park ranger played by Jeremy Holm lectures a young girl (Jeté Laurence) about wolves: “[wolves] are fighters. Just like you. You were a fighter today. A wolf.” The ranger takes the young girl home and makes her a sandwich. He sits across the table from her and reiterates: “You’re a wolf, Chelsea. Don’t you ever forget that. And don’t you ever forget me.”
A decade or so later, and Chelsea (Chloe Levine, so great in 2016’s “The Transfiguration”) is a pink-haired punk hanging with a bad crowd. Her friends include the reckless Garth (Granit Lahu), free-spirited Amber (Amanda Grace Benitez), and charming Abe (Bubba Weiler). They hang out at punk clubs, do too many drugs, and call police officers “pigs.” One night, an encounter with the pigs goes especially wrong, and Garth volunteers Chelsea’s family cabin as a safe refuge for the group to hide out. Chelsea, initially reluctant to return to the cabin due to an associated trauma from her past, eventually gives in to the peer pressure and the group drives up to the woods in their LIVE FREE OR DIE-tagged van.
They leave the van at the edge of the forest and hike the rest of the way to the cabin. (On the way, Abe pitches the group on a series of potential band names: “Oral Panic,” “Oral Panic Party,” “Dystopic Surgical Hour,” “Societal Scum, “Diplomatic Desecration…”) Once at the cabin, Chelsea tells her friends that her uncle died there when she was young, at the jaws of wild wolves in the forest.
It doesn’t take long for the bloody action to kick in. The group is hanging out near the cabin, blasting punk music and starting fires, when suddenly a shot rings out, and one of the punk friends goes down. The remaining kids run back to the edge of the wood to discover that their van is gone—and, conveniently for the plot, none of them have cell phones (it’s possible that “The Ranger” takes place prior to the advent of cell phones, but the film never makes that explicit, so.) They attempt to enlist the help of the local ranger, and soon discover that it’s the ranger himself that is doing the killing.
The bloody action is just that: bloody. This film isn’t for the faint of heart; limbs are torn, faces are axed, people are stabbed and shot and forcibly injected and caged and worse. Wexler pulls no punches when it comes to the violence, which is at once admirable and bizarrely boring. Whereas the film’s opening act is a cinematic journey into punk culture, group bonding, and PTSD, the film’s slasher-movie middle section is a retread of thousands of slasher movies before it. A huge chunk of the film is devoted to the ranger spouting preservationist cliches at the kids and then torturing them to death, which is a shame, as it’s derivative, repetitive, and not especially scary.
Still, even the more derivative moments in the film are well shot and choreographed; there’s an acid-tinged sheen over everything that goes down, it’s really gorgeously done. While this is a basically generic slasher pic, it’s also an expertly crafted one; this is Wexler’s first feature as a director and it predicts genuinely great things from her in future. She’s got an eye for genre-mashing, and an ear for it, as well—“The Ranger” is chock-full of inspired punk drops.
Worse than the generic slasher material is the inconsistent (and eventually discarded) motivation of the slasher himself. Holm is perfectly creepy as the titular Ranger (he shines especially in the film’s opening flashback), but the character-as-psychopath is all over the place. The script, by Wexler and Giaco Furino, seems itself to be confused as to whether the Ranger is specifically motivated by what transpired between himself and young Chelsea, or simply by a misplaced, overly-murderous preservationist ethos. The film over-explains its villain’s motivation to the point where you’re left wondering which version of the character is real. And it doesn’t come across as if the filmmaker is aware of that fact. Instead, it feels jumbled, unorganized, and worst of all, thoughtless.
But it’s not all bad: eventually, we discover what actually happened that day in the forest when Chelsea was young, and the answer is pretty extraordinary. The film’s many flashbacks will have you imagining the most awful things that may have happened to Chelsea that day; what actually happened is far more mundane than you might expect. It robs Chelsea of some of her “victimhood,” in what is a much more confident finale than one might expect from a first-time filmmaker.
The film wouldn’t likely work at all if not for Chloe Levine, whose performance here is deserving of a thousand “rising star Chloe Levine” headlines. She’s glorious in the lead role, elevating every scene she’s in beyond its potential genre trappings. Chelsea is a great protagonist, always thinking on her feet and planning ahead even when her dumb friends are pushing her in the wrong direction. Amber, Abe, and Garth are constantly making terrible, horror-movie cliche bad choices. Chelsea, on the other hand, behaves intelligently throughout the film. An intelligent horror protagonist is worth a thousand numbskull ones, and Levine conveys her character’s competence (and complacency) with ease.
The supporting players also do good work: Benitez is a lot of fun as Amber; a speech she gives about letting loose and screaming is one of the film’s numerous highlights. Lahu plays Garth as a straight-up asshole, but the actor clearly has a sense of humor about it: an early scene where the group runs into the Ranger at a convenience store showcases Lahu’s versatility within the narrow character range of “asshole.” Weiler is a calming presence until his one-on-one encounter with the murderous Ranger late in the film, when his character goes a bit off the rails—which is simply not the actor’s fault.
All in all, a game cast and a talented writer-director elevate this confused slasher flick above its generic blandness. “The Ranger” is a few degrees off of being great; its villain is way too confused and ill-plotted for the film to be anything other than periodically fun. For fans of slasher films who don’t mind a lack of consistent motivation on the part of the central slasher, “The Ranger” will likely be a real treat. For everyone else, the film has its redeeming qualities but is ultimately no more than the sum of its parts. [B-]
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