Red Right Hand is a solid little crime thriller that gets the job done even though it takes a little too long to do it. Crime thrillers aren’t my favorite genre but this one mostly kept my interest.

The flick stars a scruffy Orlando Bloom as a backwoods ne’er-do-well who is trying to turn his life around. But the local crime lord wants to pull him back and so uses his family as leverage to get her way. Now its a race against the inevitable as he tries to find a way out.

This is a backwoods hill folk crime thriller about small time drug runners and the damage they do. It’s not bad at the depiction. Surprisingly the kingpin is played by Andie McDowell having fun as a boo hiss villain. While her character is pretty one dimensional, she’s great at sleazing her way into a good pulpy performance. She elevates the picture by creating a villain worth hating.

Orlando Bloom vanishes into his role too. Maybe it’s his middle age and the lines on his face, his dark hair and scruff, or the convincing backwoods accent, but I didn’t see the pretty boy elf or even the second hand pirate in his performance.

Not that he needed to be great in this pretty basic thriller/revenge story. The flick doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before but it tends to do it well enough. Maybe there’s a couple extraneous characters who get in the way of a shorter runtime. The movie is shy of two hours which is probably 20-25 minutes too long.

Yeah, this one’s pretty all right. It’s acted better than it needed to be, has some effective thriller scenes, and a decent – if a little too long – shootout at the end. I’ve spent worse times with a random roll-the-dice rental.

Score: 78