An action thriller centered on a stand up, small town Texas sheriff might sound like it’s waist deep in blood red politics but “My Stretch of Texas Ground” keeps its footing solidly in a moral center.
Sheriff Joe Haladin (Jeff Weber) is the kind of low key tough guy secure enough not shoot deer, who loves his family and respects his community and is self-deprecating enough to make Andy Griffith jokes. He’s a hero of John Wayne stock but hardly one dimensional. Neither is the assassin Abdul Latif Hassan (Junes Zahdi) who looks like a GQ model, speaks multiple languages with ease and can waste an armed border patrol agent with his bare hands. Hassan and his small, specialized crew are hired by Middle East operatives to descend on the tiny town and abduct and execute Texas Senator Harlan Cruthers (Mike Gassaway) as revenge and protest for American atrocities across the Middle East. Even the blowhard Cruthers, a conservative Republican who keeps voting to fund the wars, is given the opportunity to make his case.
Writer Ralph Cinque and director Erich Kemp paint a picture of the dusty town where not much happens. Hassan joins up with his crew at the border and they make their way into the remote woods where Cruthers will be spending his recess fishing, a key tip that Hassan conveniently finds out on a side trip to Washington DC where he poses as a reporter. It’s one of several contrivances and clunky bits of exposition that likely owe to time and budget constraints. The few women don’t have much to do, and the sole black person in the film is wrestled to the floor in the police station in a scene that, in the current climate, is cringeworthy.
But as “My Stretch of Texas Ground” builds to the inevitable showdown between Haladin and Hassan who battle mano a mano, it’s bolstered by the performances from the two leads and a script that aims for complexity of character and plot instead of easy jingoism.