Westerns have always been cheap, violent and cliche. I should either quit watching them or stop complaining. There were so many of them on TV when I was a kid. I liked movie violence, but they had such stupid-looking guns. And clothes. And they lived in ugly, ugly towns.
This movie, The Old Way, had a scene they have in all westerns now. There's an isolated farmhouse. Some strangers ride up on horses. They seem polite at first. Then they kill everybody.
Contrast that with the movie Bad Company (1972). A band of juvenile delinquents cross into Kansas planning to become western outlaws. They try to appear polite and non-threatening, too, when they approach a farm, but it's because the farmer is about to kill them with a shotgun. Later, in desperation, the boys try to steal a chicken from another farm. A 12-year-old takes a pie cooling on a window sill and is gunned down by a farmer. He dropped the pie anyway when the man shot him. The farmer killed a child to save his pie plate.
In this movie, criminals kill Nicolas Cage's wife (Kerry Knuppe) while he's walking their daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) to school. It didn't make sense. The young fellow leading the gang (Noah Le Gros) passed Nicolas Cage on the road. Toward the end----I'm not sure how much I'm giving away---the guy reveals that, years earlier, Cage killed his father in front of him when he was a child (played by Everett Blunck). He murdered Cage's wife so he would follow them somewhere and he could kill him. Why didn't he just kill him when he saw him with his daughter? Maybe I missed it. Even if there's was no reason for it, it wasn't the worst thing about the movie.
Nicolas Cage underplayed it as a soulless killer who had finally settled down with his wife. He teaches his preteen daughter western skills as they pursue the killers.
According to IMDb, the armorer on the film was the same young woman who worked on the movie Rust. She's awaiting trial for the accident on the set of that movie. The website says that she was nearly thrown off this movie because of unsafe practices.
It took me a while to recognize Clint Howard. He's gotten old. It has been over 50 years since Gentle Ben.
There was a time when they did western remakes of Japanese samurai movies. That ran its course, but I'll bet they could find some other foreign historical genre to plagiarize and reinvigorate the American western.
Available on Hulu.
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