In Dig, Thomas Jane and Emile Hirsch need to uncover a better script
Maybe the most notable thing about this would-be thriller is Hirsch's cartoonish hillbilly accent
If the goal of Dig is to make us feel any kind of sympathy for Scott Brennan (Thomas Jane), the kind of caricatured country dad who’d go looking for his out-past-curfew daughter in a desert honky-tonk while wielding a giant mallet, it gets off to an unconvincing start. After hauling his daughter (Jane’s real-life daughter Harlow, playing a character named, what else, Jane) over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, he proceeds to the nearest gas station and starts a fight with an armed trucker who shoots his wife dead during a skirmish. Stupid and irresponsible to a deadly degree aren’t the most endearing qualities in a movie protagonist.
Scott has a weirdly specific job, as a salvager who goes into old homes and strips them of their fixtures. Naturally, he gets an equally weirdly specific request from a customer named Victor (Emile Hirsch), who wants to pay in stacks of cash, and requests he get the job done extra-quickly. Scott is at least smart enough to see the red flags, but the gas-station incident left Jane traumatized and mostly deaf, in need of a cochlear implant costing $30,000. He was supposed to take a week to go on a fishing trip with Jane, who for obvious reasons pretty much hates him. But after instead dragging her along for some hard, dubious labor, his candidacy as dad of the year is clearly in question.
Hirsch’s hillbilly accent is so cartoonish that when he later shows up at the salvage site wearing a ski mask, it’s absurd to imagine Victor’s hiding his identity in any way. Mercifully, the movie eventually acknowledges this. Along with his crazy girlfriend Lola (Liana Liberato), he holds Scott and Jane at gunpoint, telling them the real job is to retrieve what’s buried deep under the porch. Because Victor and Lola are clearly awful people, the likelihood they’ll let daddy and daughter out alive seems slim. So it’s up to Scott, who’s already been established as a reckless fool, to outsmart his even stupider armed captor.
The entire production feels like one of convenience, in which a desert parcel of land with a run-down house on it happened to be available, and a script got written to take advantage of that fact. Unfortunately, the movie never does anything interesting with the actual house; the action mostly takes place around the hole Scott and Jane dig outside. Every so often they try to escape and find there’s nowhere to go. It’s tough to build dramatic tension with a story that feels like it’s spinning its wheels until the titular excavation finally uncovers something.