Monsters from the bog

It’s part coming of age story, part murder mystery and part lust-driven noir a combination that requires careful handling, which it receives from director Lee Daniels.

The edgy, Oscar-tinged buzz around those films might be the reason for the long list of high-profile actors who appear in this piece, which might otherwise present itself as too risque a project to get involved with.

Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack and Scott Glenn all come with big reputations, and other major players David Oyelowo and Macy Gray are increasingly highly rated actors.

The complex but easy to follow storyline involves a college drop-out (Efron) who is employed as a driver by his journalist brother (McConaughey) and his writing partner (Oyelowo), who return to a small town to investigate the story of a death-row criminal (Cusack), whose sentence may be bogus as pointed out by a letter-writing groupie (Kidman).

Bar the superficially sophisticated and black Yardley (Oyelowo), this is a collective of the purest white trash pedigree, with even successful writer Ward (McConaughey) proving that you can take the boy out of the bayou, but you can’t take the associated murkiness out of the boy.

Kidman and Cusack’s characters are both magnetic but malodorous, but are only worse than the others involved in their drama by virtue of their not caring whether or not people know or approve of their agendas.

Nobody is likeable, and Efron should have done enough with his dark, convoluted performance here to finally cut the string tying him to his High School Musical persona and announce his arrival as an actor with real range.