“I don’t know what this stuff is anymore. Our gold. God’s gold. Fool’s gold.”

Screenwriting duo Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, whose shared credits mainly consist of the lighthearted movies Zemeckis directed (but, also, oddly enough, Bordello of Blood), seem to have shaped their screenplay for Trespass to match the sensibilities of director Walter Hill.

Hill has spent the majority of his career making Westerns and Westerns disguised as other genres—almost all of them male-dominated action films. Here he crafts a modest little crime thriller in which two rural firefighters (Bill Paxton, William Sadler) hole up in an abandoned building in St. Louis where they believe a stash of gold was hidden long ago, only to bear witness to a mob-related killing and find themselves trapped inside with a talkative squatter (Art Evans) and a gangster’s (Ice-T) hostage younger brother (De’voreaux White).

The scenario is not dissimilar to John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and as the plot unfolds the dissolution of the various alliances mirror that film’s betrayals as well. Unlike Huston’s insightful and character-driven film, however, Trespass is shallow and daft—it’s a popcorn action movie through-and-through and fulfills this slight ambition with ease.

Hill tracks the violence and power struggles with a restless camera made even more effective by the location-bound narrative and occasional diegetic inserts pulled from a camcorder. Even if the credits look kind of silly with both Ice-T and Ice Cube in prominent roles, the accompanying soundtrack is quite effective—a Ry Cooder score interspersed with songs from the two aforementioned rappers, plus Public Enemy, Gang Starr, Black Sheep, and more.