Co-written by the director and his brother Rick, there's a moment about a third of the way into Red Rock West, when Cage is boarding the roof of a truck with the aid of a plank. At this point the audience get the definite sense that this is striving to be knowing retro-noir sleaze cast from very much the same mould as Joel and Ethan Coen's delirious feature debut, Blood Simple. Coincidence piles upon coincidence, identities shift, motivations become muddied, and all the time a wry smile is never far from the movie's lips.

Things hot up in Red Rock as Lyle - the real hitman -- arrives, literally running into Michael as he tries to escape from town. The two are, they discover, both ex-Marines -- Lyle in Vietnam, Michael in the Lebanon -- and that gives them a slight, uneasy bond, in as much as anyone was ever going to bond with ole snake-eyes himself, Dennis Hopper. In fact, Hopper here is playing very much to type -- a cowboy-suited, hair-triggered, cold-blooded killer -- and having great fun with it all, much as his co-stars in their turn. Cage runs true to his best form as the simple-minded Michael, stumbling from one disaster to the next with a kind of wide-eyed innocence and ineffable charm, while J.T. Walsh delights in his black-hearted bar-owner with more than a few skeletons in the floor-safe. The only weak link in all this is, therefore, Twin Peaks-vet Boyle who may have the looks, but lacks the credible charisma for a genuine femme fatale. But even this is a minor caveat.

Indeed, so good is the movie in its first two-thirds that when Dahl loses his grip toward the end it shows badly and the neatly constructed twists, turns and tensions that bring the four central protagonists together for the inevitable final showdown are rather tossed away. The sense of what should by rights be comic-grotesque (particularly in view of their selected venue) is merely functional in its Gothic melodrama, leaving the requisite number of corpses to litter the ground. Fortunately it recovers enough in its dying moments bequeath a pleasingly offbeat final kick, and then proceeds to underline the fact with Dwight Yokam's '1,000 Miles From Nowhere' over the end credits. (Yokam cameos effectively as a truck driver in the picture).

The places where it wrongfoots itself emphasise the quality of the bulk of Dahl's second feature (his Kill Me Again was a negligible, heavy-handed debut). Maybe if one stops to consider the house of cards that are the tortuous twists of plot too closely it's patently ridiculous, but while you're inside this cowboy-noir what it lacks in emotional resonance is more than substituted by the sheer head-spinning first-order rollercoaster entertainment it undoubtedly provides.