Clear Cut

Clear Cut is an 88-minute survival thriller built on a simple, durable premise: a man who knows the woods better than anyone is hunted through them. Clive Standen plays Jack, a timber cutter working old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest, and Stephen Dorff plays Ike, the leader of a crew that arrives with an unresolved grievance and a plan to settle it before Jack can reach help. Brian Skiba directed from a screenplay by Joe Perruccio.

The supporting cast gathers an unusual concentration of television veterans. Tom Welling, late of Smallville, appears as Keen; Alec Baldwin takes the role of Sam; Jesse Metcalfe is Eli and Lochlyn Munro is Bo. Grindstone Entertainment Group handled distribution, with Lionsgate's marketing arm cutting the official trailer and Defiant Screen Entertainment carrying the Australian release. The picture opened on July 19, 2024 and took an R rating for violence and language.

Financing came together as a Canada, United States and China co-production, split across Pink308, BondIt, BondIt Media Capital, Ambitious Entertainment and Skibavision. No budget or box office figures have been published. Audience response settled around 5.7 out of 10 on IMDb from a small sample of 29 votes, which tells you more about the film's limited reach than about its quality. [edit]

Jack cuts timber for a living, which means he spends his days among trees tall enough to kill him and equipment heavy enough to finish the job. The opening stretch of the film establishes the texture of that work: the early starts, the noise of the saws, the caution that governs every felled trunk, and the easy friction of a logging crew that spends weeks at a time in each other's company. Jack keeps to himself. The film is careful to show that this is a choice rather than a temperament.

The choice stops working when Ike arrives. Ike leads a group of armed men who have come a long way for one reason, and that reason is Jack. What connects them is violent and old, and the film parcels out the history in pieces rather than laying it out at once. Ike does not negotiate. His men move through the region with the confidence of people who expect to get what they came for, and Jack, caught away from town and away from any kind of authority, has to run.

The chase that follows is shaped almost entirely by the landscape. Jack's advantage is not strength or numbers. It is that he has spent years learning this particular forest, its ridges and drainages, the places where a man can pass without leaving a trail and the places where a falling tree will close a route behind him. Ike's crew are not tourists, though. They read the ground nearly as well, and the pursuit tightens accordingly. The film uses logging equipment, cut timber, underbrush and ravine country as the furniture of its action, and the violence stays close and physical throughout.

Around the central pair, a wider set of characters complicates the picture. Sam holds a position of some authority in the story, and his relationship to both Jack and the pursuers takes time to clarify. Keen, Eli, Bo and Jacob are men whose loyalties shift as the pressure mounts, and the film is deliberately slow to confirm which of them can be trusted. Becca and Jasmine are drawn into the conflict, while Agent Keller represents an outside institutional interest circling events from a distance, and Maddie connects Jack to the small community around the timber country.

As the pursuit wears on, the balance begins to tilt. Jack stops simply evading and starts using the forest against the men who entered it after him, and the film shifts from survival picture to revenge picture without changing locations. The backstory of what Jack did, or what was done to him, surfaces in fragments that reframe earlier scenes. By the final stretch, the question is no longer whether Jack can escape. It is whether he will, and what it will cost the men who came looking.[edit]