An absolute waste of money

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is an intriguing mystery, a puzzle with multiple parts that gradually fit in together. The acting was very good. Val Kilmer was perfect for the role and was convincing as someone with amnesia. Amy Smart was great as a sweet nurse and Sam Shepard was very good as sheriff of the border town. I don't understand why this movie received some poor reviews (some said it's too complicated) but I found nothing seriously wrong with it. It's not predictable, you are never quite sure what will happen next, and it's quite thrilling up to the very end.

Although we never really know why for certain a group of people want to assassinate the president, bits and pieces can be gleaned if one listens carefully to the background news coverage playing while the action of Blind Horizon is front and center. The main thing is that a man with a case of amnesia seems to know that a presidential assassination is to take place in a small Texas town and the president ain't even supposed to be there in his campaign for re-election.Val Kilmer plays the protagonist in Blind Horizon. Some Indian kids find him shot and left for dead at the bottom of a cliff. The wound was a scalp laceration and the bullet didn't penetrate, but the fall has left him with a case of amnesia and only bits and pieces of his life seem to come together.His mysterious presence has aroused the curiosity of Sam Shepard who wants to solve the mystery as he is the county sheriff and is running for re-election himself, his opponent being his own deputy Noble Willingham.Kilmer has three women in his life, a fiancé played by Neve Campbell that of course he can't recall, Amy Smart, a hospital nurse willing to put in lots of overtime to help this patient recover and Faye Dunaway who seems to drift in and out of his fragmented memories for no discernible reason. Just who's playing on his team if Kilmer even has a team.Blind Horizon seems to borrow a lot from both Warren Beatty's The Parallax View and the Gregory Peck thriller Mirage. Especially the Peck film, if you remember Peck was also suffering from a hysterical amnesia brought on by a traumatic event.Probably best in the cast is Sam Shepard as the small town sheriff who knows he's a small cog in things, but isn't about to let a president get himself killed in his town on his watch.The depiction of a small town in Texas is one of the best we've seen since Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. Blind Horizon might be worth a look and it's a shame that a lot of critics dismissed it the first time around.

Blind Horizon makes two mistakes, that are often typical of the thriller genre: a) the plot is convoluted and b) is comes with a conventional third act twist which is predictable. This, and maybe one too make artsy montages taking up screen time, keeps Blind Horizon far from the level of greatness, but then again, it's kind of a B-movie. As far as indie thrillers go, this one is not too bad. It presents us with three or four interesting characters, well acted, with subtlety. Too bad the screenplay doesn't choose to invest much time with them. The only one who is considered important is that who Val Kilker plays.Frank lies face down in the New Mexico desert when the curtain rises after the title sequence. He is taken to the hospital in the nearby town of Black Point. He is in a coma, but wakes up the next day. He does not remember a thing. Well...there is one thing he seems pretty sure of. He is convinced that in five days the president is gonna be assassinated in this very town. He does not know who will be committing this heinous crime, but he is desperate to get some answers.The film is directed with a good level of subtlety. It's intention is to be as subjective as possible, as it tries to emphasize Frank's conflict with his own mind. It is profound, but despite its seeming mystery, the screenplay doesn't quite cover up as much as it thinks. It doesn't really require paying much attention in order to see where the film is going, and the implication given the way the answers are revealed in act three suggests that we are meant to be surprised, (then again maybe not, could the makers be this dumb?)Blind Horizon, does not amount to a whole heck of a lot, but I enjoyed it. It is eerie, kind of interesting, and the three leads have a credible screen presence.

A good thriller is one that makes you wonder all the time of what direction the movie will go next. From that point of view, this is a good thriller. You wonder who is who and what they are going to do next. However, a lot of those questions come from a pretty inconsistent plot. It's not a bad plot, quite the contrary, but the details are a bit off most of the time.About Val Kilmer, he again makes a great role. He is more than an accomplished actor, he is still a promising one. From this point of view I recommend all his movies, starting with Top Secret :). There is a casting trend, though, to put him in movies where he is either drugged, amnesic or sick, sometimes him being FBI ,secret agent or somethings in the intelligence community. I don't think he will go far if he ends up with that label.Faye Dunnaway, Neve Campbell and some other actors that you have seen in movies and expect them to be in good roles are actually quite the secondary characters; except Val Kilmer and the basic plot, everything else is a blur.The atmosphere is good, as the movie is set up in a dusty western town and the music is appropriate. I think this is a good film to watch, not an extraordinary one, though, so don't get your hopes too high. There is a limited amount of romance and the action/violence is more suggested than exposed.