The feature debut of director/co-writer/cinematographer John Barr starts out more a taciturn senior/loner character study, then becomes a taut, violent, and elemental thriller that plays well off the action premise of one isolated hero badly outmatched by villains. It deserves to be a video sleeper for action film collections.
The filmmaker utilizes the scenic locations of his native Maine (the original title was Allagash), with vast northern forests, mainly explored by hunters. One such regular is Jim Reed (Tom Berenger), ex-Marine and now-sober alcoholic, haunted by his past and his fault in the car-crash death of his daughter. Feeling the weight of age, guilt, and failing health, Jim goes into the winter woods around the Allagash River intending to shoot a buck.
Instead, by the worst kind of mishap, he blunders into a gang of criminals who have just pulled off a multi-million-dollar casino robbery that left several dead. The aged protagonists' struggle against the well-armed pursuers gets an effective, fatalist treatment makes superficially similar "Die Hard"/Rambo franchises look like the silly fantasies that they are.
Veteran actor Berenger, onscreen almost the entire time, deserves much praise (though nitpickers might carp that the premise relies on the assumption that cell phones are not in common use, or that a dead body lying in the open gets mysteriously overlooked), while Barr's depiction of raw, urgent survival in a frozen wilderness calls to mind Jack London's famous To Build a Fire among other frostbite classics.
The main disc extra is a making-of featurette, in which Berenger draws a comparison with the iconic Deliverance, and it's a good point. Recommended for survivalist library programming.