Review of Highway Dragnet

"Highway Dragnet" is a frustrating film. The actors do a pretty good job and the look of the film is quite nice. It's too bad, then, that the writing was so lousy. In fact, the film is filled with so many logical holes that it resembles cheese! Richard Conte plays a Korean War vet who has just returned home. He's decided to visit Las Vegas and ends up getting into a ton of trouble. That's because after having a loud altercation with a dame in a bar, she ends up dead and all the facts seem to point towards him. So what does he do? Yup, crime film cliché #5--he slugs the cops and disappears!! And, when he hitches a ride out of town, surprise of surprises, one of the ladies driving this car eventually ends up being the real murderer!!! What are the odds?! And, to make it worse, at the end of the film, this murderous woman shoots a detective at point blank range with a .45--and the guy is only SLIGHTLY wounded!!! He SHOULD have had a hole in him large enough to drive through, but miraculously he survives AND hears her make a confession to the original murder!!!! How convenient! Can any of this really happen in the real world? No way! But in this bizarre film, time and again, the impossible seems to occur--making it a very sloppily written movie. It's a shame, as Conte did a good job and he was a fine actor who was simply better than the material they gave him. You can do better than this with your viewing time.