After a moment’s hesitation, Roy decides to take Raquel ( Elle Fanning) with him. But while Roy is understandably eager to flee the scene, something rivets him in place: A young girl in a slinky red dress is tied to a chair in the living room. Roy, however, is quick on his feet, and manages to stab his way out of the ambush during a one-take fight scene that channels the same macabre grace of Laurent’s breathless 2014 psychothriller “ Breathe” (her knockout second film as a director, which still feels rich with unrealized potential).
A quick word of caution to any aspiring henchmen out there: If your bloodthirsty employer insists that you go to the next job unarmed, it’s probably because they don’t want you to come back alive. It’s unclear if Big Country is feeling threatened about the fact that Roy used to date his new girlfriend, or if Roy just isn’t earning his keep, but the boss has decided to eliminate his steely-eyed enforcer. These days, Roy works for a local crime lord called “Big Country” (Beau Bridges), who runs his sad little empire out of the back of a laundromat.
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Thanks to an efficient bit of writing, we learn all of these things about Roy in a single moment, as he storms out of a medical clinic before the doctor can even finish reading his diagnosis. Just kidding, he’s yet another of the actor’s signature basket cases a super intense ex-con with a hair-trigger temper, a penchant for violence, and a terminal case of lung cancer. Ben Foster stars as Roy Cady, a light and fun-loving guy with absolutely no demons in his closet whatsoever. Written for the screen by a first-timer named Jim Hammett, “Galveston” drops us into the dirty shallows of the New Orleans underworld circa 1998. If anything, this reheated serving of meat-and-potatoes crime fiction is so to the point and in the moment that it doesn’t even seem to invite any deeper meaning until its unexpected final moments. At a tight 87 minutes, the movie just doesn’t have time to dance around the task at hand. Adapted from a well-received novel of the same name that Pizzolatto wrote prior to his success on premium cable, “Galveston” is draped with all the self-serious despair that looms above the author’s infamous HBO series, but it crucially lacks the same capacity for bullshit. It takes far too long for “ Galveston” to emerge from the novocaine of its various clichés and allow us to feel the tender flesh that bleeds across every scene of this seedy road noir, but - in fairness to director Mélanie Laurent - some filmmakers are never able to break the leathered skin of a Nic Pizzolatto story (see: “True Detective” season two.
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