It's 1988 and wildfires have ravaged the Texas countryside. Alvin (Paul Rudd) took a job to paint the lines on the road to get away from the world. He takes his girlfriend's slacker brother Lance (Emile Hirsch) along for the job. Alvin doesn't see much in the sex obsessed Lance, and Lance is chaffing at the isolation.

This is a very small indie with basically the two main actors in most of the scenes. These are two good actors with a lot of sex talk, relationship struggle, and an aimless story. There are a couple of chuckles and a few interesting scenes. However they are too few and far between. It doesn't have the energy of a road movie or the poignancy of a relationship story. The last third turns up the heat, but it quickly becomes silly. I think there is a good half-movie here. The rest of this doesn't have enough energy. It's very subdue.

Paul Rudd (Alvin) and Emile Hirsch (Lance) carry this two-man show to success. Not long ago before I watched "Prince Avalanche" I saw "Our Idiot Brother" from two years ago for the first time and was very pleasantly surprised by Rudd's performance. And here he delivers an equally brilliant, yet completely different turn. He plays a road worker whose task it is to paint stripes and put up signs on the roads for a very huge area. Supposedly, it's gonna take all summer, so he got his girlfriend's brother on board to assist him. The film started nicely in a creative manner with Hirsch's ramming a stake into the ground and with every push we got one of the letters from the title. However, I felt that the first act stayed really interesting. It was a bit of a presentation of the two men and what they stand for, although this was rather shallow and depicted in depth much later in the film.

When Lance leaves for the weekend and Alvin stays in the wilderness, things become quickly much more interesting though. Alvin's meeting with the old lady in the ruins was truly heartbreaking and the highlight of the film for me. When Lance returns on Monday, drastic events have happened that alter both character's lives irrevocably and from that point on until the finish about an hour later, "Prince Avalanche" turns into a thoroughly entertaining somewhat different road-movie carried convincingly by the two protagonists. The scenery where it all plays is not only hauntingly beautiful and merciless (due to what happened there before) on several occasions, but it's also the perfect place for the film and adds a truly atmospheric component to the interactions of Rudd's and Hirsch's characters.

All in all, I recommend this film. If you've made it through the first act, things quickly turn out better quality-wise and it makes an interesting watch. Even if he was the inferior of the duo, it was nice to see Emile Hirsch work with David Gordon Green again after he came pretty close to an Oscar nomination for his work in "Into the Wild". The only thing I really hated though was Lance LeGault's death. He's the third-biggest character here and it's always quite a bummer to see a rip-message in the closing credits including someone who just gave a convincing performance and entertained you in the last 90 minutes. Broke my heart kinda. But don't let this keep you from watching the movie. His last movie is worthy closure to a career spanning over six decades.

While I'm not aware of the source material (or their existed one before the script evolved),this very much feels like a play. Or at least could be a play. Which is neither a bad or a good thing in itself. But the movie lacks something, which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch can not compensate for: Essence.

It's neither overly smart nor is it philosophical to an extent where you have to think about life or other things. That in itself is not a crime either. But it makes watching two men in woods talking not something most people will care about. Or would want to watch. Of course there is a story, but even that is predictable. And the "differences" between the two characters are not worth mentioning. Still while the actors cannot save the day as I said, they make it at least bearable (no pun intended)