The story would have made a good short, say 45 minutes, not the actual runtime of 98 minutes. That said everyone did their part and the scenery was nice.
Unlike most reviewers I won't go into the fact that the stories twist is telegraphed way too early, leaving a hole that needed filling before the end scenes. No the thing I want to really comment on is the motivation behind Jake's dad and his desperate actions. I can guarantee very few, if any, will see this point, but I feel some empathy for the dad. The family courts these days can make a man desperate and a little crazy. The fact that he's portrayed as a stone cold serial killer, and a misogynist to boot, is the only way the writer could make the audience feel disdain for the man and his actions. The father never went looking for people to kill, that's an important point to note. We know nothing of the man before he turned feral, the life he led before he lost his mind. All we see depicted on screen is a crazy, selfish, deluded liar, with trust issues, who loved his son very much. His only redeeming feature is he taught his son how to survive without society as protector and nanny. All he wanted to do was shield his son from an unjust world, and he did it the only way he knew how, to run and hide.
The way the young man was used as eye candy, is a little excessive, showing double standards are the only standards these days. The shower scene was appropriate and conveyed meaning, the other nude scenes are purely for people to perv on, like I said, hypocrisy thy name is Hollywood.
I'm with the dad on this, women can be trouble. The movie inadvertently shows this by the female leads actions. She's older and wiser than the young protagonist, yet she asks few pertinent questions and provides little in the way of useful information. Then she doesn't tell the sheriff exactly what happened, so of course he's going to put it on the back burner. Contrived convenience wouldn't you say?
Society is to blame for Jake's state of affairs, make no mistake, the father is also a victim. Desperate people do desperate things.
