So far director Roger Michell’s career has been a little bit on the fluffy side. Among his back pages you’ll find films like his adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and more recently Notting Hill. But he’s made attempts to do some darker stuff such as Titanic Town, about the Northern Ireland conflict, and also with his first American film, Changing Lanes.

This is a story about two men who meet randomly but dramatically one day. Ben Affleck plays a young lawyer called Gavin Banek who’s become involved in a somewhat shady deal poised to make millions for the law firm he’s working for, which just happens to be owned by his father-in-law. Samuel L. Jackson, meanwhile, plays Doyle Gipson, a recovering alcoholic in a child custody dispute with his estranged wife. When they meet, both of them are actually both on their way to court; Banek to file final papers in the case that will make millionaires of them all, and Gipson to the family court to make his case for gaining custody of his kids.

How they meet, though, is what changes things for them both, as they manage to sideswipe each other in their cars on a motorway and cause an accident. Gipson wants to play everything straight and wait for the police, but Banek just hastily writes a blank cheque for the damage and speeds off from the scene in a bit of a panic. In doing so, he inadvertently leaves behind some vital papers, which Gipson saves. He is late for his appearance and the judge rules against him, which begins a cycle of the two men taking revenge on each other, trying to drive each other to increasing personal and professional disaster.

About two thirds of the way through, though, Michell suddenly turns in another direction instead of continuing to build this pattern of mutual vengeance, and Changing Lanes suddenly becomes a story about moral issues. This is nice, in that it doesn’t just toe the predictable line and doesn’t just do what you might’ve expected it to do on the basis of the first hour or so. The problem is, it doesn’t really work in practice. It doesn’t exactly come from nowhere but there’s still not enough buildup to it, not much to make you think it could easily go in that direction, and there isn’t enough time allowed for this latter part of the film to develop.

The end result for me was that the film basically felt like a not terribly well integrated combination of two versions of the same film. It’s like there were two different drafts, the more basic action thriller script and the potentially more interesting exploration of how the character faults of the two men got them into the positions they’re now in, and both of them got partly made, then the partial versions were joined together. Unfortunately, like I said, it feels like the join wasn’t made very well, and there is a fair bit of a disjunct between the two parts.

That said, I’m still going to give the film a recommendation because apart from that it’s fairly well made and well acted, especially Samuel L. Jackson who turns in a really strong performance as Doyle Gipson, and even if it doesn’t entirely come off it’s nice to see a film following a course other than the easily predictable one. At any rate, the film wound up being more than the bog-standard Hollywood thriller I was expecting, so that’s got to be a good thing.