IN 2008, Sylvester Stallone planned to make an actioner based on Peter Craig’s novel about a 17-year-old daughter who ran away from her mother, got into trouble with a bunch of hard men and turned to her recovered alcoholic tattooist father, on parole from a longish prison sentence, for succour in her predicament.

After Stallone’s project fell through, French director Jean-François Richet picked it up and, using a screenplay by Craig (who better for the task?), filmed it in New Mexico. The result is not an influential piece of cinema, but more than a mere potboiler nevertheless with well-crafted dramatic values, vigorous, violent, compassionate, morally ambiguous, emotionally oscillating between intense and restrained.

The film’s driving force is Mel Gibson, in his 61st year projecting as much vigour and chutzpah in the role of John Link as he offered in many of his earlier films. Coming from a mainly TV series career, Erin Moriarty is, at 22, already perhaps a tad too mature to play 17-year-old Lydia, in danger of descending into the grim kind of life that might well overtake an attractive teenager unrestrained by caring parental guidance. That reliable supporting actor William H Macy plays Link’s mentor in the caravan-park community where he is trying to honour his parole if only the bad guys from south of the border would stop trying to derail him.

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