Throughout Nic Cage ‘s prolific career, he has yet to do many westerns.
Aside from Butcher’s Crossing, which premiered at TIFF last year but hasn’t had a wide release, Cage has never done a western. So I was eager to check out Nic Cage’s latest outing, The Old Way, which Cage also produced through his Saturn Films production company. While The Old Way may not break new ground in the genre, it was still a serviceable film that fans of Cage or Westerns will enjoy.
The Old Way follows ex-gunfighter Colton Briggs (Nicolas Cage), who, alongside his daughter, Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), seeks revenge when outlaws kill his wife. While revisionist westerns like Unforgiven or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford tend to be the more highly regarded genre films, the past few years have shown an increase in Westerns that choose to lean into tropes rather than deconstruct them. Films like In the Valley of Violence, Old Henry, or The Harder They Fall succeed at embracing the classic tropes and compensating for relatively predictable plots through strong action or performances. The Old Way falls in the latter category, thanks primarily to Nicolas Cage. His performance as Colton Briggs perfectly captures a disconnected gunfighter teetering on the edge of reverting to his cold, killer lifestyle ways. When he talks about how emotionally blocked off he’s been all his life, you feel the weight in his dialogue and his frustration on how much he doesn’t know who he is anymore. Seeing Cage balance his uncomfortability with the life he built for himself and trying to toughen up his daughter is intriguing. There was fun in watching Cage’s Briggs trying to teach his daughter how to lighten up and act scared, boosted by Armstrong’s straight-man demeanor. Despite a solid performance from Cage and Armstrong, as well as some of the outlaws (played by Noah Le Gros and Clint Howard), the film doesn’t have much to offer.
The script is the barest of bare-bones; what you see is what you get. While the film does have some solid action and an accessible plot, it still feels unambitious. Director Brett Donowho has lovely landscapes to communicate the vastness of the West, tumbleweed towns and all, but he doesn’t do anything unique or interesting to capture the emotion of the scenes. His cinematography and lighting look flat like he thinks just presenting what’s on camera is enough. His direction needed a sense of atmosphere or mood; without that, all we have is a bland product.
It’s no wonder that I felt that the film was meant only for die-hard Nic Cage and Western fans, like myself; it is a well-constructed movie with some solid performances and nice scenery but the bland cinematography and lack of real atmosphere holds the film back. With stronger direction, The Old Way could’ve been a more meaningful and striking film; instead, we got something that’s certainly watchable, but flavorless.
The Old Way will be released in theaters on January 6th and on VOD on January 13th.
