Vaughn argues in favor of the law, but Marcus lays out how neatly trapped they are: drugs, alcohol, and a child shot with a gun Vaughn wasn’t legally allowed to carry. The move may have saved Vaughn’s life, but it’s left them with two dead bodies–one of them only a child–and the dawning certainty that reporting this would ruin their lives. Will he fire? We never know, because Marcus fires on him first. He’s also equipped for hunting, and he’s drawing a bead on Vaughn. (And really, when you think about it, shouldn’t a kid growing up in an area known for its hunting be a little more cautious about hanging out right next to that season’s game? Come on, kid.) Vaughn completely freezes up–and then the boy’s horrified, grief-stricken father crashes into the picture, and it’s hard to tell if he’s hearing any of Vaughn’s stammered explanation. He didn’t see the boy, and we didn’t see the boy. And Vaughn fires–and kills a boy who was out camping. Then Vaughn spots a deer, and Marcus coaxes and encourages him to take the shot. None of these things should matter too much. When they go into the woods, they basically have it together. The cocaine use is the most unconventional wildcard, but Marcus isn’t high out of his mind, just a little more wired than usual. The movie plays all this out without too much emphasis, and you can feel how these are all nothing more than minor wrinkles to the characters involved. He loans Vaughn one of his other guns, breaking the law in the process. Vaughn forgets his ammo and assumes he can just use Marcus’s instead, and Marcus has to explain through gritted teeth that they have different kinds of rifles, so no, actually, he can’t. Marcus has snorted a little coke in order to reconcile himself to getting up at the crack of dawn, and Vaughn is irritated by it he’d thought Marcus had quit all that. On their first morning in the woods, little things go wrong. He’s the experienced hunter, while Vaughn is the naif who has let Marcus orchestrate the pesky details like his gun license. He has a pregnant fiancée back home, and his domesticity emphasizes a softness about him that’s lacking in Marcus, who is blunter and more aggressive. Marcus is the initiator Vaughn more of a passenger. Marcus and Vaughn–old school friends with a little bit of distance and a lot of history–go on a hunting trip in the Scottish Highlands. A dark, relatively stripped-down thriller, Calibre brushes up against Deliverance-style tropes about city slickers running into trouble with tight-knit rural communities, but at its heart, it’s really just a merciless study in how quickly and thoroughly things can go wrong.
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