There’s a proud cinematic tradition of average Joes named John rising to the occasion and exacting bloody, violent vengeance after a previously unknown party wronged them. First there was John Rambo in 1982’s First Blood; then there was John McClane in 1988’s Die Hard; then there was John Wick in 2014’s John Wick, and now there’s John Hawkes in the trailer for Too Late. The feature film debut from Dennis Hauck stars Hawkes as a detective named Sampson who gets caught up in a whole heap of trouble involving strip clubs, drug dealers, and missing women. As you can imagine, things turn deadly serious and seriously deadly with a quickness.
What’s particularly unique about Too Late is its format — told non-sequentially over the course of five acts, each of which is shot as a 20-minute single, unbroken take. While it would be easy to chock extended oners up to being the hip filmmaking move right now (thanks, True Detective season 1!), here it serves to immerse the viewer in the action, giving a sense of tension and urgency to every scene. With a filmmaking style that evokes the likes of Robert Altman and Tarantino, Hauck’s Too Late looks like a roiling mystery that will come to an explosive, supremely tense conclusion.
Too Late, which also stars Robert Forster, Crystal Reed, and Rider Strong, hits theaters exclusively on 35mm film on March 18, 2016.
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Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter and ask about his overly convoluted backstory (@Osteoferocious).
