If it didn’t have such a promising start and a gleefully chilly performance by Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons, you could simply write off You Can’t Run Forever as a low-budget B movie.

Alas, the purported thriller runs out of steam and stakes long before it comes to its lazily predictable ending.

The film starts with Simmons on a motorcycle, pulling into a gas station to fill up. Some annoying white trash folks are arguing about one of them and his yippy little dog.  Simmons casually but deliberately walks across the parking lot to those people and shoots them dead without even flinching. With a friendly wave to the station attendant, he remounts the bike and pulls away and we are instantly curious; where’s this going? Where’s he going?

Next, he ends up in a park (looks to be the beautiful Pacific Northwest) where a man and his stepdaughter are in the car, talking. While killing the father, the daughter escapes and, yes, runs for her life through the forest.

Now we have a cat and mouse trope with, again, a very relaxed, unangered Simmons on the hunt for the teenaged girl. There is an uncompelling side story about the girl’s very pregnant mother waiting at home, wondering where her husband and daughter have gone, but every cut to the suburban household is a momentum-breaker for the chase in the woods.

Simmons is fun to watch- a deadpan serial killer with a greater sense of humor than a cold-hearted killer would usually present. That take kept me watching. But as it coasts toward the inevitable, I can’t say I had any concern for the remaining characters or what would happen before the credits rolled.]

You Can’t Run Forever is in theaters. Rated R for bloody violence. About an hour and forty-five minutes.