"Pressure Point" qualifies as just another formulaic hostage thriller that suffers from comatose direction. Jed Griffin (Michael Madison of "Reservoir Dogs") is taking his familywife, teenage son, and tweener daughteron a long overdue vacation into Vermont to ski. Meanwhile, ex-con Rudy Wicker (Jeff Wincott of "S.W.A.T.) and his partner plan to rob a bank and make a clean getaway in a plane over the border into Canada. However, everything goes wrong when they hold up a small-town bank. First, Sheriff Bingham Hunt (Steve Adams of "The Bone Collector') mortally wounds the driver of the getaway, and the vehicle careens out of control and smashes into Hunt's wife Tracy (Claudia Bess of "Strip Search") as she is trying to give him his personal radio. Rudy gets off with what appears to be a flesh wound and races out of town. No sooner has he left the city limits than another sheriff's deputy blue-lights him. When the deputy approaches the car, Rudy jumps out and guns him down, then ices his partner, and commandeers the sheriff's cruiser. The grief-stricken Hunt sets out to capture and kill Rudy, but Rudy outsmarts him and hijacks Jed and his family while the protagonist is making small repairs to his 1979 motor home. Rudy gets tire of Jed's sass, shoots him, and leaves him for dead on the roadside. Earlier, after Rudy shot the sheriff's deputy, he not only stole his cruiser but also his jacket. Now, Rudy leaves the sheriff's jacket with Jed and takes off with Jed's family as his hostage. Rudy is bound and determined to reach his rendezvous point with the plane so he can get out of the country. As it turns out, when Rudy shot Jed, Rudy's bullet lodged in Jed's cell phone and Jed resolves to catch up to Rudy. The problem is that Jed doesn't know that Sheriff Hunt is determined to kill Rudy. Moreover, when Jed tries to flag Hunt down, the sheriff sees the jacket taken off his murdered deputy and shoots first before he can confirm Jed's story. Director Eric Weston juxtaposes scenes of the sheriff's manhunt, Jed's efforts to rescue his family, and Rudy's desperate efforts to get away with the loot. Unfortunately, juxtaposing these three characters and their objectives generates no suspense. The cliff-hanger conclusion doesn't add much to this paint-by-the-number nonsense. Clearly, Madison needed a paycheck. In fact, we learn nothing about Madison's character because the scenarists provide him with no backstory. As this generation's Robert Mitchum, Madison has great presence but he makes no impression on this second-rate actioneer. Martial arts expert Jeff Wincott adopts a different look, but his vicious killer is a nit-wit. Michelle Scarabelli effectively plays one of Hunt's level-headed deputies who ensures that her hysteria-riddled sheriff doesn't kill the wrong man. "Pressure Point" lacks pressure from start to finish and makes no point other than to burn time.