The Old Way – Review
95 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Carl W. Lewis
Directed by Brett Donowho
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
Nicolas Cage stars in his first-ever Western as Colton Briggs, a cold-blooded gunslinger turned respectable family man. When an outlaw and his gang put Colton and his family in peril, Colton is forced to take up arms with an unlikely partner — his 12-year-old daughter — in this action-filled film that builds toward its fateful showdown with pulse-pounding suspense.
Who would have thought that it would take Nicolas Cage (checks IMDB)…106 movies to get to his first western?
You would assume he must have accidently made a western before now, right?
I try not to read reviews before I see the film for myself, afraid that they might color my own review, but one blurb on Twitter caught my eye, which said something like “how dare Nicolas Cage make a western that is boring.”
With that in mind, allow me to retort.
Cage plays gunslinger Colton Briggs on an even keel: so even that he might be described as either a high-functioning autistic or a sociopath. With barely a blip of emotion, he guns down several men to open the film, retires and marries a good woman.
Twnety years later and he is still married, is running a gneral store, and has a twelve-year-old daughter whose behavior is… familiar. Definitely the daughter of Colton Briggs.
Played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Briggs’ daughter, Brooke (not a real “old-west” sounding name, is it?) presents as cold and emotionless as Colton, and though I had put Colton on the probably “sociopath” track, I had Brooke down as somewhere on the autism spectrum, especially after she meticulously cleaned and sorted the jellybeans by color into separate jars.
Once the precipitating event occurs, I kind of find myself wanting to move her to the “sociopath” track, though, as her father attempts to explain to her that she needs to act like other people to be able to successfully integrate into society without drawing undue attention.
The fact that she also harbors a bit of a violent streak once exposed to that world is a bit disconcerting.
What follows is a series of western tropes and cliches, all of which are punctuated by both Cage and Armstrong’s… unique… take on their characters, and the ending provides a glimpse into life after these events for young Brooke that is both unsurprising and unnerving in many ways.
Overall, yes, you could describe The Old Way as “boring” if you really wanted to, but I think I’m going to go with “deliberate” and “guilty of making some interesting choices in character development” instead.
Also interesting: here, as in many other period movies, everything feels clean. Sure, they’re wearing work clothes or patched clothes or old clothes, but even the dirt feels artificial, added on, without any of the depth of grunge you might expect from the situation or period.
Just a weird little observation.
The Old Way is not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it could have been so much better. I did enjoy it; I just wish I had enjoyed it more.
The Old Way is currently playing in theaters and Premium On-Demand/Digital and stars Nicolas Cage, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Noah Le Gros, Clint Howard, Kerry Knuppe, with Nick Searcy and Shiloh Fernandez.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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