Sean Penn's promising career looked set to take off with this violent downbeat father/son drama. The script presented Penn for once with a well-drawn character, a rough kid lured into a world of violence by his murdering crook of a father (yet another chilling, smiling psychopath from Christopher Walken), but held teetering on the edge by his love for a spunky 16-year-old girl (a rare tiresome performance from Mary Stuart Masterson). The bad news is partly the jerky direction of James Foley, partly dialogue which seems to have been subjected to some primitive form of recording, with Tennessee accents an additional problem. Instead of letting the situations speak for themselves, Foley has his actors laboriously spell things out, so some scenes seem to drag on for an eternity. It is, in short, a film that one way or another sorely tries our patience. Such reliable screen veterans as Millie Perkins and Candy Clark have little to do here but stand around and watch.

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