Accidental Texan

Accidental Texan

A bad first impression does not necessarily mean a movie is terrible. But it is important for the film to stick its landing so that people don’t leave muttering, “it was fine, but that ending.”

Still, there are movies that never recover from how terribly they start in the first five minutes. One of those is “Accidental Texan,” whose opening sequence fails so completely to convey a cinematic look and feel that one wonders how much director Mark Lambert Bristol knows about life in general. If you can’t convincingly convey filmmaking as a filmmaker, what could you possibly have to say about anything else?

That’s certainly context for the down-home folksiness that drives most of the movie, which takes place after aspiring actor Erwin Vandeveer (Rudy Pankow) loses his leading role in the aforementioned blockbuster. Why? Because a technical error causes his phone’s ringtone (which is on) to somehow set off a series of explosions that destroys the entire set he’s standing on.

Erwin is driving back to Los Angeles when his Prius breaks down, forcing him to walk into some wholesome one-horse hamlet straight out of central casting. There, he meets Faye (Carrie Ann Moss), an unconvincing small-town diner waitress no offense to Ms. Moss, who’s great, but she has never called anyone “hon” in her life who tells him that the people here in Buffalo Gap live simpler lives than do Angelenos and therefore wait until tomorrow to have his car towed; he stays much longer than that.

His Boston upbringing and book learnin’ (he’s a Harvard business school dropout) provide foils for the film’s rough-palmed rural conservatism embodied by Merle Luskey (Thomas Haden Church), who is exactly like Merle Haggard except way more conservative. Like this town itself, Merle is a conservative fantasy brought to life he’s an independent oil man, of all things, which means he gets to live the Republican dream of being a “small business owner” and destroying the environment at the same time.

You see, Merle has some bank problems that need a Harvard boy to solve. And while it’s hard to look at a guy who owns multiple oil rigs as an underdog, it’s also hard to wrap your mind around a soundstage that’s rigged to self-destruct when someone’s cell phone goes off. And so here we sit, trapped by generic sentiment and puzzling conceit, in a movie that would provide at least some small pleasure through its casting were it not directed as if Bristol were wearing oven mitts.

Faye looks at Merle with wet eyes, Merle dispenses gruff wisdom, Erwin learns about loyalty and hard work the hard way (literally), and the town sheriff throws his cowboy hat on the ground in frustration because those old boys have done it again! Bruce Dern shows up for a little while as an eccentric old coot who talks to his pet cow. Everyone agrees that rugged independence is great but you can’t build soundstages like this and also quirky humor never quite lands even with the help of a score that hits every emotionally manipulative beat imaginable.

Some of that disconnect stems from clumsy filmmaking.

The cutting of this film is terrible: There are many cuts between characters talking in the same room that appear to have been filmed miles apart. (Maybe they were, but it’s an editor’s job to make sure we can’t tell.) Additionally, the script is so declarative and predictable that it assumes its audience must be dumb.

That last point gets at what makes “Accidental Texan” such a strange song played on wrong notes. This movie panders hard: Cultural signifiers like tall, cool glasses of sweet tea and Whataburger wrappers are prominent in the frame, and Merle says he dropped out in the eighth grade to work on his daddy’s rig because he’s just as smart as Mr. Harvard over here.

It’s unclear whether this endeavor is inept but well intentioned or a cynical bid to fleece the DVD section at Walmart. If it’s the latter, well good job. “Accidental Texan” opens in select theaters this weekend; ironically, most of them are large cities.

Watch Accidental Texan For Free On Gomovies.