Joe ** ( R) Here’s your audience selection guide, making sure you can distinguish among three recent violent redneck dramas with overlapping elements. Killer Joe, featuring Matt McConaughey, was a grisly little tale with some darkly comic aspects, and at least one great, edgy scene (hint - chicken was involved). Mud, also featured McConaughey. One of its talented young co-stars was Tye Sheridan (playing Ellis, not his pal with the wonderful nickname, "Neckbone"). Both were worthy ventures into the problems of poor, rural Southerners. This one ain’t.
The eponymous Joe of this sordid story is played by Nic Cage. Sheridan plays the only relatively likable character with much screen time. Joe runs a crew of Black laborers for a lumber company that’s trying to skirt environmental laws governing planting and logging. Joe is a good boss, but he’s barely able to control pathologic rage issues that have already earned him one stretch in the big house. Sheridan is stuck with a miserable, brutal drunken dad. He stays around in the hovel they call home to protect his mom and sister, but may be overmatched. He starts working for Joe. The two bond. Meanwhile, there’s trouble brewing with local cops, a jerk with grudges against both, escalation from Sheridan’s dad, plus a couple of other potential sources of menace. All these set-ups produce little gratification for viewers who invest time in the morass of problems these characters face.
The whole thing adds up to a pointlessly depressing slice of a handful of caricatured lives. (4/11/14).