Vanishing Point 1997

Jimmy Kowalski, Viggo Mortensen, a Gulf War veteran and former stock car racer, now works as an automobile restorer and delivery driver at a shop in Idaho. To help pay his wife’s mounting medical bills, he takes a high-stakes assignment delivering a 1971 Plymouth Roadrunner to New Mexico. While there, he is offered another job: delivering a 426 Hemi-powered 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T to Salt Lake City, Utah. On the way, he is informed that his wife’s pregnancy has taken a turn for the worse, so he heads back home to Idaho, stubbornly refusing to stop for police when flagged down for speeding.

An interstate chase ignites as Kowalski finds himself pursued by a relentless Utah sheriff, Steve Railsback as Sergeant Preston, and an FBI agent who, in the wake of Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege, is determined to brand Kowalski as a drug runner or a domestic terrorist. The pursuit is complicated—and occasionally humanized—by The Voice, a radio shock jock who becomes fascinated by Kowalski’s cross‑country sprint and who is voiced by Jason Priestley as The Voice. The Voice’s curiosity grows into a pursuit of truth: he soon uncovers the real motive behind Kowalski’s rush, and realizes that the mission is not a crime spree but a desperate dash to get home to his ailing wife.

As Kowalski tears across desert highways, he strays into harsh, empty landscapes and ends up on a Native American reservation where he gets lost and blows a tire. There, he meets a Rodney A. Grant as Vision Quest Indian, who offers aid and a different perspective on survival. The journey then veers toward a human connection with a woman on a motorcycle, the Motorcycle girl Peta Wilson, who becomes part of his precarious arc. Her boyfriend, Gilmore, played by Peter Murnik, is hiding from the IRS and is initially suspicious that Kowalski is a government operative. After Kowalski and the Motorcycle girl convince Gilmore that he is “one of them,” Gilmore and his partner agree to help by riding out to locate a replacement oil pan and to craft a plan capable of slipping Kowalski through a tense roadblock.

With their aid, Kowalski mounts flashing police lights on his roof and charges toward the roadblock, a risky gambit that momentarily fools the officers into mistaking his Challenger for another patrol car. A shot shatters the rear window, forcing Kowalski to improvise his escape. He switches off his headlights and vanishes into the darkness, relying on night-vision goggles he acquired from the man with the scanner. The pursuing helicopter’s infrared detection remains a threat, but Kowalski hides the car beneath a large sheet of tin and slips away into the night.

Morning arrives, and Kowalski wakes from a nightmare about his wife, dialing a hospital phone booth and speaking to the same doctor as before. He steers the Challenger back toward the road where this odyssey began, stopping again at the roadblock that framed the film’s opening. A flashback crystallizes the tragedy: his wife, Christine Elise as Raphinia Kowalski, dies at 7:19 a.m. from kidney failure. In a final act of defiance and devotion, Kowalski drives the car straight at the roadblock, a symbol of both his personal loss and his stubborn commitment to being with his wife in her last moments.

The story closes with an epilogue from The Voice that leaves the door ajar: officials claim Kowalski died in the crash and that the body was never recovered, yet eyewitnesses insist he escaped with the help of sympathetic onlookers. A possible future is sketched where Kowalski’s Mexican friend finds his tags and reveals that Kowalski may be living in the wilderness with his newborn daughter, off the grid but never truly gone from the world he fought to protect.