Once in… there’s no way out.”  That is the tagline for this crime drama, and it seems fitting as the only way an audience member will be able escape the 105 minute journey to nowhere that is Texas Killing Fields, short of walking out the door and wasting £6, is by waiting til the credits roll.

Ami Mann (daughter of the famous American filmmaker Michael Mann) is relatively new to the director’s chair and it is certainly obvious in this film. She seems to have tried too hard to make her film multi-dimensional and as a result, ends up failing to fully explore any of the dimensions that she chooses to incorporate. Mann does a decent job of establishing atmosphere in several scenes and there are hints of character development along the way, at least as far as the main characters,  but the problem is that the film never really seems to run far enough with anything.

Perhaps the biggest problem with  Texas Killing Fields is that, as a crime thriller, the expectation is for some sort of a mystery that the detectives, played by Sam Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, are meant to solve. However, the so-called detectives perform very little actual detective work and after the first twenty minutes or so, it is made so obvious to the audience who the film’s ‘baddies’ are that you almost expect there to be some sort of twist at the end, which never comes. As a result, the suspense and tension that is crucial to the success of any crime thriller is, for the most part, lacking. In fact, most of the killers end up bringing themselves to justice without our heroes having to even fire a shot.

Texas Killing Fields is allegedly  based on a true story. If this is the case, then perhaps the lack of a strong cohesive storyline can be attributed to Mann attempting to be true to real life events. However, after watching the film, one might then wonder whether the story was really worth making a movie out of in the first place.