I wouldn’t call it a return to form, but The Old Way is easily better than anything Nicholas Cage has done in the last three years (with the possible exception of Butcher’s Crossing, as yet unseen by me); then again, that bar wasn’t particularly high, now was it? The film is a low-budget, hybrid knock-off of True Grit and Unforgiven that isn’t, despite its title, very old school; we have CGI fire, CGI muzzle flashes, CGI bullet wounds, and CGI blood. Once again I gotta ask, when did fire become a cheap visual effect? I mean, if push comes to shove, just rub some sticks together. Also, can you really not spare a little real fake blood? (the picture’s locations include something called “Yellowstone Film Ranch,” which apparently doesn’t include extras. There’s undeniably a measure of authenticity here, complete with your standard frontier town with a wide Main Street, a saloon, and a room over the saloon occupied by sexy hookers; the problem is that, other than the main characters, the town seems to be inhabited exclusively by the hookers).
Colton Briggs (Cage) is a former cold-blooded gun-for-hire turned general store owner and family man. In the opening sequence, Briggs kills a man in front of the man’s young son. Gee, do you think the boy will grow up to enter The Revenge Business? Sure enough, “20 Years Later” Briggs has been saved by The Love of a Good Woman; the question is, who’s going to save her? And the answer is, well, not U.S. Marshal Franklin Jarrett (Nick Searcy) and his deputies, who are said to be “a day, day and a half at most” behind outlaw James McCallister (Noah Le Gros) and his gang, yet still manage to arrive at the Briggs homestead after McCallister (who is none other than the boy from the opening scenes, all grown up) has left, but before Briggs and school-aged daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) return from Briggs’s store.
And so on and so forth. The plot goes from familiar to predictable in no time flat, but that’s not to say that the movie doesn’t have its moments — especially the interactions between Briggs and Brooke, the latter of whom is by far the most intriguing character in the film. Best described as a mix of Wednesday Addams and Jiminy Cricket, she’s one of those Movie Kids that behave like tiny adults for no good reason (and having her mother murdered doesn’t count because Brooke was already pretty fucking aloof before that); the character, however, works because not only does Armstrong act circles around most of the rest of the cast, but she also goes toe to toe with Cage.
It also helps a lot that this is Depressive Cage (as opposed to his other preset mode, Manic Cage), so that his Briggs and Armstrong’s Brooke really do bring the expresssion ‘like father, like daughter’ to life (well, not so much ‘life,’ but you get the idea). Brooke is the way she is because she’s a chip off the old, cold, hard block, and ironically that they’re so alike is precisely the reason that Briggs and Brooke have such a hard time bonding — which they eventually do in the film’s highlight; a campfire-lit scene where Cage has a great speech about how he only knew fear for the first time when he met his now late wife (“Fear she wouldn’t talk to me. Fear she wouldn’t love me. Fear I couldn’t make her my wife. Fear of losing her”), and Brooke follows suit, explaining that “When Mama died, I didn’t feel anything,” but not because she’s unfeeling, but rather because it was as if she couldn’t feel anything anymore.
It’s not all moping around, either; there’s also a very funny scene involving the morose Briggs fruitlessly trying to teach her equally morose daughter how to cry so they can trick a rider and take his horse; the result is nothing short of priceless. Another winner is when Briggs sends Brooke into a town on a reconaissance mission, instructing her to “Head straight for the mercantile. Go inside and ask the man to buy something, and then casually ask if any riders had come through town.” Once in the store, Brooke ‘casually’ repeats verbatim some cockamamie story she had heard earlier from a customer in her father’s own store.
At this point it crosses my mind that Brooke may very well be ‘on the spectrum,’ as they say in the parlance of our times. Unlike modern movies wherein, like I mentioned above, children act like grown-ups reasonlessly, it would make sense here that no one brings up words like Asperger’s because the term didn’t even exist in that time period.
But anyway, the little girl may or may not be autistic, but the climax certainly is fucking retarded. Here’s McCallister’s ‘brilliant’ plan: “we’re gonna have a showdown, you [i.e., Briggs] and me, and you get the opportunity to put a bullet in my head just like you did my daddy. And if you do that, Eustice [Clint Howard] here, he’s gonna blow your little girl’s head off … Now, you kill me, and watch your little girl die.”
It doesn’t occur to any of them — and it sure as hell should occur to at least one of them — that if Briggs kills McCallister, and Eustice (McCallister’s sole surviving henchman) in turn kills Brooke, then Briggs would, as sure as night follows day, drop Eustice like a sack of shit. This presupposes that Eustice is willing to die for McCallister, and from all that what we’ve seen of Eustice thus far, he may be old, dumb, and ugly, but crazy he is not. So yeah, that shit don’t fly.
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Zodiac (2007)
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90% of Everything is Crap 