THE OLD WAYS – Review by Susan Granger
Until recently, Nicolas Cage had never made a Western. Now he’s made two. Butcher’s Crossing – about an frontiersman searching for a hidden valley of buffalo he can slaughter – was the first, now there’s The Old Way.
Set in the Montana territory in the late 1870s, Cage plays coldly reformed gunslinger Colton Briggs who left his outlaw days far behind him when he married Ruth (Kerry Knuppe) and sired a daughter, Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). Living on a nearby farm, Briggs is the respectable proprietor of a small frontier town’s general store.
One day – after Colton walked 12-year-old Brooke to school – hapless Ruth finds herself surrounded by four menacing men, led by escaped convict James McCallister (Noah Le Gros). It’s no accident that they arrived there since James saw Colton kill his father 20 years ago when he was just a lad. (That incident is shown in the prologue.)
Now, by murdering Ruth – James is out for revenge. Later, when Colton and Brooke arrive home and see the carnage, the emotionless chase is on.
While pursuing James, who’s heading toward Santa Rosa in southern Colorado, Colton teaches emotionally-withdrawn Brooke how to survive by protecting herself and shooting a gun. Soon they’re joined by a local marshal (Nick Searcy) and his deputies who are also after James McAllister.
All-too-reminiscent of Unforgiven and True Grit, there’s little originality in Carl W. Lucas’s contrived, utterly predictable screenplay, blandly directed by Brett Donowho (Acts of Violence).
What adds a frisson of interest, however, is that the armorer for this Western was Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was accused by the assistant director and Cage of conducting ‘unsafe firearms activities’ on the set. She was subsequently involved and is under investigation for the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after an accidental firearms discharge on the set of Alec Baldwin’s film Rust.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, The Old Way is a dismal 4, streaming on Amazon Prime.
