Old time review

Over 100 films in a career that most recently saw him play a grieving truffle hunter (Pig) and not one, but two metaversions of itself (The unbearable weight of a huge talent), it’s really shocking the old fashioned way This is Nicolas Cage’s first real western. (passage of the butchersanother Cage western that opened in Toronto last year has yet to be released.) Unfortunately, this is the only surprising element of Brett Donowho’s film, an avenger in numbers set in the last days of the old west and unfavorably reminiscent of the Cage’s digital television. was.

A pre-title prologue introduces us to Cage’s bounty hunter Colton Briggs, whose prodigious skills with a six-shooter are on full display as he transforms a town square into an impromptu bloodbath. With his Yosemite Sam ‘tatch and a Wayne-worthy gaze that ends up settling on the son of one of the men he just dispatched in a moment of foreshadowing that’s the subtlest thing here, Cage sells like a killer. -of blood. .

When we meet him twenty years later, Colton has hung up his holster and lost his facial bushes, and is now living a dream on the prairie with his wife Ruth (Kerry Knuppe) and daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). ). But then James McAllister (a feisty but careless Noah Le Gros) and a group of mindless thugs arrive to avenge his father, and things quickly take a turn for the finale. real grain Of the.

The most frustrating of the old fashioned way It’s not so much a bland, cheap pastiche of a hundred best-westerns with little stylistic ambition or narrative depth: at least bland is forgettable. No, what’s really annoying is that Donowho and screenwriter Carl W. Lucas actually have one trick up their sleeves, two, in fact, that they continually fail to play, or at least play effectively.

Whether driven by the writing, directing or acting, Colton and Brooke show clear signs of neurodivergence. At first we see Brooke meticulously sorting the beans; later, she perfectly mimics a tirade she heard a few days ago about apples without hesitation. In a stunning fireside scene featuring Armstrong and Cage in top form, Colton and Brooke bond over their shared emotional handicaps. It would have been fascinating to explore how these characters navigate and deal with a changing world in an age where autism wasn’t even a word. Instead, everything goes according to plan, until a startling “Let’s do it the old-fashioned way!” in the end. Based on the previous 90 minutes, maybe not, actually.