Sub-Tarantino
If you make a movie in which every
single character is repellent, you won’t find many viewers finding the picture
appealing. Quentin Tarantino might have reflected on that when he made The Hateful Eight, a picture which this
one tries to emulate in some ways. But Outlaws
and Angels (and despite the title there are no angels) is plain nasty.
There are no ‘goodies’; everyone is appalling. It is also graphically violent
and contains a good deal of sexual assault. It has its qualities but you will
need a strong stomach to watch it.
You might like this kind of thing
It’s a ‘siege’ Western, one of those
plots where badmen on the run, in this case very violent bank robbers, take
over a family’s house. You know it’s going to end in a bloodbath; that’s the
kind of movie it is. In the old days Randolph Scott or someone would have been
there to stop the bloodshed and, even if a baddy, do the decent thing. But
those days are long gone, e-pards, aren’t they. Now rape and murder abound.
Vaguely interesting is the way that the
family is slowly discovered to be just as revolting as the outlaws. The mother
is afflicted with religious mania and has been complicit in her husband’s
incestuous relations with their daughters. These two girls hate each other
viscerally. The whole bunch is rotten through and through.
Dripping poison everywhere
As a movie, the picture is weak in
several ways. It is too long, for one thing, at nearly two hours. The pace is
sluggish. If the dialogue and ‘psychological Western’ aspects were strong enough
it might have worked but as it is, the film drags. Gruesome violence provides
the only punctuation.
Another problem is the acting. It stars
Francesca Eastwood as one of the daughters, Florence. Unfortunately her diction
is so bad that she fluffs several key lines, e.g. the one that explains why she
so loathed her sister (Madisen Beaty). The lead outlaw Henry is played by Chad
Michael Murray and his diction isn’t much better. I needed subtitles for much
of the film. Both should really take a few more acting classes or elocution
lessons or something.
She is the worst of the lot of them, and that's saying something
Keith Loneker and Nathan Russell are
satisfactorily disgusting as gang members, though. Ben Browder and Teri Polo
are also OK as the vile parents. At least we could make out what they were
saying.
Plenty of gore
The movie was both written and directed by JT
Mollner, so quite a bit of the blame should be placed at his door. IMDb tells
us that Mr. Mollner has directed numerous commercials and music videos as well
some “award-winning shorts”. Outlaws and
Angels was his first feature film. It was shot on a very limited budget and
it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on a 35mm Kodak film print in 2016.
So it has some art-film credentials (or pretensions). Perhaps it was made as an
hilarious Quentinish spaghetti send-up (there certainly are spag influences) and
I’m missing the point.
JT
The story really needed some at least vaguely ‘good’
lawmen hunting the outlaws, perhaps to arrive at the last minute, but there is
only a ruthless bounty hunter (Luke Wilson) and his Mexican sidekick (Steven
Michael Quezada) and they are written out for most of the action. Who the
angels of the title were is a mystery. The bounty hunter didn’t have a facial
scar so maybe that was to show he was less evil. I’m not expecting a 1950s
B-Western or anything but you do need someone
to at least vaguely identify with, someone you sort-of hope might get out of it
alive. But there’s no one. Good riddance to the lot of them, really.
He has a scar so must be the baddy
Francesca Eastwood’s mother Frances Fisher, of
Unforgiven (but there’s no Clintish
quality in the Western) has a small part as a shrewish wife murdered early on
by the gang. She was about the best actor on the set, actually.
Not my cup of tea.
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