It’s a good thing this film has a large cast, because a lot of folks are going to meet their Maker through graphically delicious means before the dust settles. This all Black Western continues the thread of hyper-violent Cowboy flicks, reaching from here to Tarantino to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, with a lot of stops in between. For many reasons, it is one of 2021’s best movie viewing experiences.
Westerns have often served as a mere template, upon which filmmakers have placed contemporary themes, music and even dialogue. Director Jeymes Samuel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, does the same, using new and/or modern era music, along with dialogue that is much more reflective of right now than anything from the Old West.
It starts with a kid whose parents are brutally murdered by a bad, bad man (the inimitable Idris Elba doing his slow –talking best to scare the crap out of us) called Rufus Buck. Before leaving the boy alone with his dead parents, Buck carves a cross into the kid’s forehead with a razor.
Flash-forward: the kid is now a grown up Outlaw called Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) who robs the people who rob trains and banks. In other words, as bad guys go, Nat is good and we root for him and his gang.
The story will involve double-crosses, gang on gang shootouts that are gleefully bloody and expertly filmed and edited, and a third act twist that is just perfect for the Western flick mythos – something of a throwback after so much revisionism. I will let the narrative unfold for you without further synopsizing.
Director Samuel has as confident a hand as anyone I’ve seen who is making his feature length debut-there is style in droves, from the lighting of his charismatic cast, to the fight choreography (which includes a to-die-for mano a mano between two women played by Regina King and Zazie Beetz). At close to two and a half hours, They Harder They Fall takes the phrase “epic Western” literally. It is big and it is intimate and everything in between. I will list most of the cast below the trailer – this group is already in strong contention at this early date for Best Ensemble.
I dug it, and I am not a Western movie guy. It was a thrill to watch.
By the way, although the story is completely fictitious, characters in the film did exist in history-the names are of real people.
The Harder They Fall is streaming on Netflix and received a limited theatrical release on October 22nd. | 4 out of 4 Stars
Cast:
- Jonathan Majors as Nat Love
- Idris Elba as Rufus Buck
- Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary
- Regina King as Trudy Smith
- Delroy Lindo as Bass Reeves
- Lakeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill
- RJ Cyler as Jim Beckwourth
- Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee
- Edi Gathegi as Bill Pickett
- Deon Cole as Wiley Escoe
- Damon Wayans Jr. as Monroe Grimes
- DeWanda Wise as Eleanor Love
