Fantastic!

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Blistering performances.

Kidnapping a wealthy woman can lead to problems, especially if her husband is not only unwilling to pay the kidnappers, but flees with the ransom money. An uneasy alliance is quickly formed and a pursuit through the Washington State Forest ensues. There are some surprise revelations along the way, a bit of dark humor, and a lot of emotional hand holding. Guns miraculously turn up in a bus first aid kit, and at a fish hatchery, aiding the survivors of a bus wreck as they flee. Ed Begley Jr. and Miguel Ferrer provide some stability to the otherwise amateurish acting, and there are a couple of exciting moments, otherwise this is easily forgettable. -MERK

A mediocre film involving a trio of villains (including Miguel Ferrer and Linda Purl) chasing the usual assemblage of disaster victims (including Ed Begley, Jr.) through the damp, chilly, dramatic forests of the Northwest coast.Weaknesses: The acting. Lessons needed all around. Even performers who have been good elsewhere seem to be hobbled by the script and the direction. Miguel Ferrer, after having been full of determination and anger, at one point must cross a chasm on a tiny tram and he hangs back. "What's the MATTER?", Purl demands. "I'm scared to death of heights," Ferrer confesses, and his expression remains exactly as it was during his previous incarnation as a bull-headed, reckless murderer. Or -- let me put it this way. Have you ever visited the Hall of Presidents at Disneyland? The display where the robotic figures go through their animatronic antics, imitating live humans? Ed Begley, Jr., does better -- praise be to him. He has TWO expressions. Cowardice and contempt. His is the role of the corrupt banker absconding with the funds. Compare Berton Churchill in "Stagecoach" or Frederick March in "Hombre." Linda Purl has some real potential but it's stifled here. With a little effort, you feel you might roll her up into a little ball of sodium propionate. Saucy little figure, though.The script is rudimentary. The three heavies track down a bus and shoot it off the road. The crash into the woods is actually pretty well done. Applause for whoever directed that scene. Then follows a pursuit, the three heavies after the passengers, which include a young boy whose hair never is messed up and a beautiful blind woman who shares a sleeping bag naked with the heroic but dumb leader of the survivors. (Don't ask. Well, okay. She fell into a freezing cold stream and he had to jump in after her and they had to get nude together to keep warm. By the way, he falls asleep -- easily, if you ask me.) There is one of those rickety wooden bridges that the diverse innocents must cross. Will the blind chick have trouble with all those missing planks? Will a body fall into the chasm below? A hiker who is a real nonentity shows up near the start of the pursuit and you know immediately he's dead meat.Strengths. Well, the title is pretty good, although completely misleading. "Deception Ridge" is a fine and ominous name but it doesn't figure in the story, which is rather more than an "incident." Some of the crises and their resolutions are implausible but none are spectacularly, supernaturally IMPOSSIBLE. It's not as bad as SOME such thrillers. (Cf., "Cliffhanger.") Probably because many special effects were too expensive, but, for whatever reason, it's kind of interesting to see these low-mimetic types hoof it through wood and stream. Nice streams too. Foaming little rapids and glacier blue depths. Some of those pristine rivers are choked with salmon during the season when they spawn. I spent hours letting my spinner twirl among them and never caught any. Come to think of it, there was this little girl not far down the bridge with a home-made hand line pulling up one salmon after another. A humiliating experience if there ever was one. I wanted to use her as bait. But, never mind all that. These are pretty scenic locations. They include a monstrous chute that looks like the Reichenback Falls if the Reichenbach Falls were made with cement. Imagine a salmon trying to get up that thing? No degree of piscine horniness would lead to success.If you want to while away two hours and can overlook the acting and the stilted parts of the script, this ought to get the job done.

What happened to Miguel Ferrer? He's such a good actor yet constantly gets stuck in bad projects like this. He must be the worst judge of scripts.In this apparently made for cable TV outing Ferrer plays a crook who kidnaps Jack Davis' wife (played by Linda Purl) and holds her for ransom. What he doesn't know is the Davis' aren't getting along. So Jack (Ed Begley Jr.) decides to take the ransom money and take off on a bus instead of paying it to the thieves. But Ferrer and his brother catch up with the bus, machine gun it and run it off the road. Thus begins a chase through the woods with Ferrer pursuing the bus crash survivors (a blind girl, a kid with asthma, the usual disaster movie assortment), led by an ex-con played by Michael O'Keefe (who just looks embarrassed to be in this movie). Incredibly, even though they are lost in the woods for two nights--NOBODY comes looking for the missing bus. Apparently when buses don't show up when and where they are supposed to, nobody ever gets curious or I don't know, send out someone to search for them.Davis' idea of taking the money is also pretty lame. When I read the description on the box, I thought his plan might be to get the ransom money, say he paid it and let the kidnappers kill his wife, claiming they took the money and killed her anyway. But no, Davis and this movie are NOT that clever.

The plot couldn't be simpler but the acting is reasonable to good, and the nature scenery (British Columbia come Oregon) is beautiful. This is an entertaining action movie with some character development and a bit of romance (good and bad) that didn't take a lot of effort to follow. None the less the film keeps your attention because the scenes change so rapidly.There is no gratuitous foul language, but a bit of silly shooting.It is not overly clear or credible why the larger group of burdened pursued, keep managing to outrun their fleeter-footed pursuers. And it is never clear why the pursued didn't try to deceive their advantaged pursuers.5.7 / 10 on my scale