Much like the screenplay he wrote for his father’s Oscar-snaffling “Gravity”, Jonas Cuaron takes the simple idea of strangers in a strange land, puts them in a perilous situation, and pulls the trigger. Quite literally in this case, because “Desierto” is the linear roadrunner style tale of a group of Mexican immigrants being picked off one by one by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s overly patriotic racist.
We are running with Gael Garcia Bernal’s Moises, a family man attempting to return to his son in Oakland. We gather snippets of information, sparsely provided by the script, and know very little about the rest of the group. They are essentially this film’s version of the “Star Trek” red shirts, there only to be found in the target of Dean Morgan’s killer.
With sledgehammer subtlety he is named Sam, and drives around in his pick-up truck with his tail-wagging, neck-biting dog Tracker, who is surely the nastiest on-screen mutt since Cujo.
Once he has them in his sights, “Desierto” boils down to a mixture of “Bourne” and “Wolf Creek”, and despite depicting a number of people running in different directions, as an audience you know exactly where it’s going.
