Irreverent revenge Western The Harder They Fall falls flat
Jonathan Majors and Idris Elba face off in an Old West homage with more jokes than thrills
Film Reviews Unknown
According to an oft-cited statistic, about one out of every four cowboys in the post-Civil War era was Black. Thousands more were farmers or homesteaders. There were Black lawmen, outlaws, and legendary figures. Yet the number of Westerns with Black leads is remarkably small, largely confined to a handful of blaxploitation-era Fred Williamson and Jim Brown vehicles with taglines like “White Man’s Town… Black Man’s Law!” and a few parodies and pastiches like Blazing Saddles and the antebellum Django Unchained.
Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, which has a large Black ensemble cast and no white characters of consequence, isn’t here to present a realistic corrective. It’s arguably impossible to, given that the Western is an inherently ahistorical and mythic genre. Instead, what it offers is a kind of irreverent counter-cartoon, in which characters borrow the names of various Black Old West figures and little else. This poses an obvious problem of comparison: The generic quick-draw artists and bandits concocted by Samuel and co-writer Boaz Yakin are a lot less interesting than their namesakes, or the various exaggerated stories that were told about them. The gonzo factor (sadistic violence plus multiple music numbers) is intermittently engaging. The characters, not so much.
For a film that’s well over two hours long, that’s a serious hurdle. Still, there’s enough grotesque imagery in the beginning of the film—cold-blooded killing, spraying blood, freeze frames, an execution in a church—to get one initially invested in the store-brand revenge plot. Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), in real life the author of one of those very fanciful memoirs that helped define the Western myth, is here reimagined as a gunslinger; he leads a gang that specializes in robbing other outlaws and travels around exacting vengeance on former associates of Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), who years ago murdered Love’s parents and carved a cross into the younger man’s forehead.
Obviously, the inevitable finale is a dusty town-square showdown with Buck and his henchpeople. But The Harder They Fall takes the long way there, moving circuitously through subplots and way too many supporting characters, among them the deadly Terrible Trudy (Regina King), the philosophizing Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield), the hotshot Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler), the saloon-owning love interest Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), and the fearsome marshal and unlikely Love ally Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo, playing the only character who’s actually modeled on the historical figure he’s named after).
Making his feature directing debut, Samuel appears most comfortable when mimicking the eclectic influences of spaghetti and revisionist Westerns: overlong credits with a theme song and gunshot sound effects; big close-ups of badmen with ugly teeth; zooms; slow motion; Morricone-esque inflections in the score. (One repeated cue, however, sounds distractingly like “Egyptian Reggae.”) Nonetheless, the film is tonally all over the map. There are, as mentioned, some songs, as well as gags that really wouldn’t be out of place in a Mel Brooks parody. At one point, a character warns Love that the bank he’s planning to hold up is in “a white town,” only for the next cut to reveal a town square that is actually painted all white.
This kind of offbeat sensibility is in most cases a welcome thing. But in The Harder They Fall, it’s frequently offset by the plodding pace and leaden attempts at drama; there’s not one, but two different extended monologues about a villain’s childhood, delivered by different villains. Eventually, even some of the quirkier touches, like Samuel’s frequent use of overhead shots, become wearing. And that still leaves the plot, a remix of well-worn violent oater tropes that the script and direction neither subvert or transcend. Apart from some periodically amusing banter, its better parts amount to studious imitation and homage.
49 Comments
Shout-out to the underrated flick Posse. That movie doesn’t get enough love.
Which featured Billy Zane being even more cartoonishly evil than he was in Titanic.
I loved every bit of it.
Demon Knight level of cartoonish? Because I enjoyed his cartoonish clowning in that movie.
Huh. I’ll watch, but I hope it’s not full of 1990s slang.
It is…and TO THE EXTREME, BROSEPH!
How Da West Was Da Bomb.
I was skeptical when I read a review of this that said the movie punctuated the statistic about black cowboys with “THESE. ACTUALLY. EXISTED,” emphasized by gunshots. Props to it for serving as a corrective, but I’m not gonna watch a movie that starts with a Westernized version of a handclap emoji tweet.
Writing each word with a period pre-dates emoji’s by years. Handclap punctuation is a performative version of the same thing.
That’s incorrect. The graphic reads THESE. PEOPLE. EXISTED. and there are no gun shots, nor any sound fx, that accompany the graphic. We debated whether to add distant thunder and decided it was too much.
“but I’m not gonna watch a movie that starts with a Westernized version of a handclap emoji tweet.”Weird flex.
I see A.V. Club has at least fulfilled its contractual obligation to work the word “oater” into every Western review.
This and the New York Times crossword are the only places it still appears.
Naw, VARIETY still uses it, too.Otherwise? Pretty much…Pilgrim.
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
..largely confined to a handful of blaxploitation-era Fred Williamson and Jim Brown vehicles with taglines like “White Man’s Town… Black Man’s Law!”And sometimes even the titles were difficult….
let’s hope the commercial for this masterpiece showed some 70’s sexpot like Jill St. John swooning before Fred Williamson LOL
I can offer you this, rated PG….
Even assuming that a C+ from Ignatiy is everyone else’s B-, this is a little disappointing: that’s one hell of a cast, but even the trailer raised the possibility that they were being largely wasted, and this review seems to confirm it.
Still, is it really as bad as Cry Macho??
It has a less crappy title.
Yet this review rates it 4 stars. Go figure, don’t listen to critics their opinions are no better than ours. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/the-harder-they-fall/
This could be Adam Sandler kinds of bad, and I’d probably watch it anyway just for the cast.
having a good cast means nothing if you can’t direct. Jeymes Samuel hasn’t really proven himself to be competent yet.
I watched it, the cast is so great that the movie gets a little lost in the middle trying to give them all their time to shine. The villain gang especially felt disconnected because King, Lakeith and Elba were all given origin stories even though it’s Elba and Majors story. That formula worked in Kill Bill but it doesn’t work in this movie.The last 40 minutes are truly a blast though.
I mean, there was also Posse, which I remember liking.
Yeah, how can you talk about “black cowboy” movies without talking about Posse? It’s the only black cowboy movie between the mid-70s and, like, now.
Same. Even Stephen Baldwin was watchable in that, and that’s rare.
As I recall, Daniel Baldwin took Ben Kingsley to acting school once.
Is that the one with Billy ‘The Kid’ Porter?
Hmmm, I was looking forward to this, and will still be checking it out (I missed it at the BFI festival last week) but this review has tempered my expectations slightly.As a slight aside, I’m still surprised no-one has made a big budget show with Bass Reeves as the hero. Seems like the sort of larger-than-life-but-actually-real sort of concept that could effectively straddle both the Western and the Superhero aesthetic if done right (although, to be clear, I’m aware that the real-life man wasn’t a saint, even if he is a legend).
Apparently some other folks have been thinking along the same lines: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/david-oyelowo-bass-reeves-series-viacomcbs-deal-1235010448/amp/
Every couple of years I hear whispers on the internet of a Bass Reeves show or movie or something, usually with a big name attached to at least produce, and then nothing ever seems to come from it. The closest we’ve gotten, as far as I know, is an episode of Legends of Tomorrow and a story arc in the Atomic Robo comic.
He was in the Watchmen tv show a little bit, that was cool.
He showed up on Wynonna Earp.
this movie deserves to break the Internet. And win some awards, too. Golden Globes, you have no excuse!
ironically, the golden globes aren’t happening so they actually do have a pretty solid excuse.
This had such an amazing first trailer, the second one made me less excited about it though, and now that excitement is well and truly gone.
So this isn’t a sequel to The Harder They Come?
The stat about black cowboys makes me realize that Silverado must be the most racially accurate Western out there. Four main cowguys, three white and one black, just like the statistic says!
And Jeff Goldblum rockin’ furs and a spangly waistcoat!
LOL “Slim Goldstein, Old West Jewish gambler and ne’er do well”. Still makes me laugh at how they crowbarred him into an otherwise pretty good western.
“We’ve narrowed your character’s name down to ‘Hopalong Rosencrantz’, ‘Yakov the Kid’, ‘Butch Cohen’, or ‘Slim Goldstein’.”
High concept movie with an all star cast and being disappointingName a more iconic duo
I don’t mind watching a mindless action flick……unless it’s over 2 hours long. Do movie studios think they are giving us more value by making longer movies? It’s a rare film that needs to be over 2 hours long. After that latest Bond flick, I felt like half my day was gone. And don’t even get me started on the Irishman. Calling it an epic doesn’t make it an epic.
PREACH. I have said this since Endgame. I hope the studios don’t think that movie did as well as it did because it was 3 hours long. It almost makes me wonder if the studios make movies that long to torture the viewer (or more accurately, the viewer’s bladder) in a sick passive-aggressive way. When making action flicks, aim for Taken, not Endgame.
So this is not a belated sequel to the Jimmy Cliff movie?
“given that the Western is an inherently ahistorical and mythic genre”citation needed
looking forward to seeing how they explain Elba’s English accent in America because I love the guy but his American accent is painful to listen to