As 2025 comes to a close and publications have all indulged the annual tradition of top 10 best -of lists, the Hollywood machine now kicks in to high gear with endless weeks of awards shows, showering accolades on the same handful of pre-ordained, high-profile titles. It might seem perverse then to single out a low budget, DTV action-thriller that came out weeks ago with virtually no fanfare (beyond the handful of critics who specialize in this sort of thing). But the pleasures of the cinema are wide-ranging and varied, and Jesse V. Johnson’s Thieves Highway is the sort of small-scale, nuts-and-bolts genre fare that soars precisely because it has no delusions of grandeur. It won’t win awards, and its future is unclear as it’s, like so much these days, destined to slip into the endless content maw of streaming. In this world, a familiar face to slap on a poster and secure international co-financing is all you really need, and if this production model/exhibition pipeline can feel mercenary, the end product, in this case, is anything but. This is tough, unpretentious filmmaking, the sort of thing studios churned out en masse decades ago but have now relegated to various On Demand providers. Thieves Highway isn’t a great film, but it’s a good one, and immensely satisfying in its modest ways.
Johnson has spoken in interviews about being inspired by the films of Budd Boetticher, particularly his cycle of short, punchy B-westerns with the axiomatic Randolph Scott. Thieves Highway transplants the Boetticher spirit to a modern-day tale of cattle rustling, as Oklahoma Department of Agriculture officer (and self-described “cow cop”) Frank Bennett (Aaron Eckhart) attempts to track down a ring of thieves who are hurting the bottom line of the local cattle ranchers. The film begins with the rustlers brutally beating another officer, leaving him permanently disabled, and so it’s also personal for Bennett. After tracking some suspicious trucks late into the night, Bennett and his partner Bill (Lochlyn Munro) stumble across the staging ground for this vicious group. Unfortunately, Bill isn’t long for this world (he’s one day from retirement and has four kids at home), and Frank barely escapes with is life after a brief shootout. The gang, led by Jones (Devon Sawa), leaves him stranded in the woods while they speed off with the loot. And so begins a game of cat and mouse, as Frank attempts to find a phone to call in reinforcements and Jones attempts to evade capture.
A series of chases and tense encounters ensue, but this isn’t a hand-to-hand combat action picture that fans of Johnson’s collaborations with Scott Adkins might expect. Instead, he ratchets up the tension, building to a final standoff between two opposing world views — Frank’s belief in law and order and the value of honest work, and Jones’ cynical belief that the world has left him and others like him behind, necessitating a dog-eat-dog kind of social Darwinism. Eckhart and Sawa are both very good here; Eckhart has fully settled into the world of DTV action at this point (this is his second film with Johnson), and acquits himself nicely here as a taciturn man of action. Sawa has long shed his baby-faced slacker persona from Idle Hands and the original Final Destination and aged into a forceful screen presence, hard living now etched onto his face along with a thousand-yard stare. For his part, Johnson captures the natural beauty of the rural surroundings, but also constructs a few sharp, claustrophobic set pieces along the way. This is lean, sharp filmmaking, the epitome of Farber’s termite art. There aren’t a ton of good Westerns these days, neo or otherwise, and it’s more important than ever to cherish the ones we get.
DIRECTOR: Jesse V. Johnson; CAST: Aaaron Eckhart, Devon Sawa, Lucy Martin, Lochlyn Munro; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: December 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
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