Few people in Switchback (1997) seem to be acting in the same movie, so it doesn’t help that it’s a bit of a narrative jumble, too. It is, to distill its story down, about a hunt for a serial killer, but it has so many different threads and tones that you never quite feel the graveness of those stakes in the pit of your stomach the way you’re supposed to. 

It toggles between two plotlines. In one, a taciturn young hitchhiker, Lane (Jared Leto), is picked up by Bob (Danny Glover), a charming, gregarious man who drives a supposedly borrowed Cadillac whose interior is bedecked in plastered-everywhere pictures of centerfolds. Since the identity of the being-looked-for murderer isn’t confirmed until the end of the movie, it’s implied that the culprit is one of them or someone offscreen who happens to be in the same area. In the other, an FBI agent named Frank (Dennis Quaid), ostensibly on the hunt for a long time now, teams up with the pointily eyebrowed sheriff (R. Lee Ermey) of Amarillo, Texas, the town in which the killer is believed to have most recently struck, to continue the investigation.

Glover, along with the fleet of actors playing the Texas-police personnel who mostly just get in Frank’s way, seem to be acting in something that might otherwise have been written and directed by the Coen Brothers. They lean into the kookiness of their characters. Leto and Quaid, in contrast, approach their characters with a po-faced somberness befitting something helmed by Michael Mann. Leto seems like he has hundreds of pounds of weight on his shoulders as a young man regretful of his past. Quaid, who says his lines in a whisper that suggests a man about to burst into tears at any moment, is so stony that you expect his arc to go somewhere gloomier than it does — like this was supposed to be a dreary movie about the hopelessness of revenge. (Part of the reason he’s so invested in the case is because his young son was kidnapped by the murderer — an act effectively staged in a prologue complete with a cat-at-the-camera jump scare whose suspensefulness is never again matched.) He’s so psychologically and emotionally worn down that he isn’t even phased when he’s tasked with deescalating a high-stress situation where a man has a knife tickling another man’s throat. 

If it were to be winnowed down to just the stuff with Leto and Glover — whose scenes together become increasingly tense because of a lack of clarity around who’s telling the truth about themselves — Switchback might better coalesce, ultimately becoming a flinty, unnerving two-hander whose stakes become higher once icy roads force them to abandon their car in some punishingly snowy terrain in the middle of nowhere. But all the movement back and forth, combined with an unnecessarily padded-out running time (the movie, which you could imagine functioning well between the 80- and 90-minute mark, is a distended 118 minutes), only makes you more impatient not just for its wrap-up, but also for writer-director Jeb Stuart to settle on what, exactly, he wants the movie to be: a straight-faced crime thriller or something slightly more off-center.

Everything would be much more laborious were it not for Glover, who’s consistently entertaining to watch as a very charismatic man you never can quite get a feel for. Is he simply an affable eccentric, or does his smiley, personable personality mask something more malevolent? We really do want to find out, but once we prematurely get definitive answers around whether he is or isn’t the film’s bad guy, Stuart offers few more reasons to get reinvested in a narrative that has, by that point, gotten more than a little lethargic.