There's a particular kind of joy I get when watching a western on the big screen. The wide-open spaces, the horses, the sprawling stories -- they just beg for a big, big screen.
So, I'm really happy I managed to see this latest remake of Angel and the Badman on the big screen. It was visually lovely when writ large that way. There were a handful of shots that I wish I could screencap and share with you, because they were absolutely gorgeous. Sunlight filtering through the walls of a barn. A beautiful sky reflected in a still pond. An abandoned mission that captured my interest especially much, even though it's only onscreen a tiny bit here and there. Very cool set, that one.
I was especially fond of its deliberate color palette -- filming on location in New Mexico gave it a lot of browns and sands and beiges, but also huge blue skies to balance it all.
And those were the two main colors of the film: brown and blue. Dirt and sky. Earthly concerns and heavenly concerns. Quirt Evans (Zachary Levi) gradually leaves the earthy, worldly part of society to join the quiet farming life of Penny (Meg Fraser) and her family. As he changes, he goes from wearing primarily brown to more and more dark blue. Penny herself wears a lot of bright and light blue throughout the movie, and the filmmakers like to position her against the blue sky.
I'm going to try REALLY hard NOT to spend this whole post comparing this movie with
the 1947 original that starred John Wayne, Gail Russell, and Harry Carey. I will dig a little into comparisons at the end of the post, though. Also, although I'm going to be critical of this movie farther down in this post, I do want to say that I very much enjoyed it. I hope it does well at the box office. I hope Angel Studios makes more westerns. I especially hope Zachary Levi makes more westerns, because he was surprisingly well suited to the genre.
In fact, this movie's biggest strength is its cast.
I've been passingly familiar with Zachary Levi for quite a while now -- mainly from his playing Fandral in two of the Thor movies, plus voicing Flynn Ryder in Tangled (2010). Now, I am always prepared to like a guy in a cowboy hat riding a horse. In fact, if you look at my favorite actors, they're all guys who either have made westerns or look like they ought to make westerns. But I was not prepared for Levi's particular blend of playful and broken to be so, so effective in a western. His double-takes were my favorite thing in the whole movie. He absolutely convinced me Quirt Evans was a bad guy who wouldn't mind not being a bad guy anymore, but who wasn't real upset with being on the wrong side of the law either. His initial motivations seemed to be simply to get what he could, however he could, and hang onto it as long as he could. Kind of a Man With No Name sort of vibe, but with more humor and less squinting.
Tommy Lee Jones, I've loved since I was 13 and first saw The Fugitive (1993), which has remained a top favorite film of mine ever since. Jones will one hundred percent elevate any film he's involved in, without fail. He cannot be boring. Cranky, cross, bitter, mean, acerbic -- sure, he can and will be any of those. But boring? Never. And he's not boring here, playing semi-patient and fairly inscrutable Marshal McClintock.
Meg Fraser was fine as Penny Worth. Her grandma Harriet (Melissa Chambers) was an absolute hoot, and would have been my favorite character if not for something dumb the script did toward the end.
I've seen Neal McDonough in a handful of things -- I probably know him best as the bad guy who takes on Dwayne Johnson in
Walking Tall (2004), which I have seen a surprising number of times (or maybe not surprising, lol), and I've seen him in a lot of random things over the years. I'm pretty fond of him as "Dum Dum" Dugan, one of the Howling Commandos in
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). I was left wondering if the wolf pelt collar of his coat was a nod to the Sykes family in
Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024). McDonough uses his ice blue eyes to chilling effect as infamous outlaw Laredo in this, but his character remained hard to figure out throughout. No the actor's fault, I think -- I'm blaming the script.
In fact, I had kind of a lot of issues with the writing. Which I'm going to vent my spleen about here, and it's going to involve SPOILAGE, so please skip to the picture of Tommy Lee Jones on a horse if you want to avoid SPOILERS.
Okay. So. Um. First of all, instead of the Worth family being Quakers like they are in the 1947 version, they are what my dad called "Little House on the Prairie Christians." In other words, generic churchgoers who belong to a generic church and are devoted to Judeo-Christian values and platitudes without talking at all about central Christian things like a sinner's need for a savior. This movie did have a church scene where the pastor mentioned Jesus, so that's a little more actual-Christian than we usually see in this sort of movie. But making them generic Christians instead of specifically Quakers made the ending falter, and muddied the motivations for the whole Worth family.
Especially at the ending, when the writers caused me to lose all sympathy for and confidence in Penny's mom and grandma. Grandma Harriet has been a ball of fire through the whole movie. She's spitting out opinions and making sly little comments and being as full of spit and vinegar as she can... until the ending, when (TOTAL SPOILER) Laredo goes upstairs to rape her granddaughter Penny. Penny's mom has been pretty strong and capable throughout the film, too. But when Laredo tells those women if they interfere or make any noise or do anything at all while he is upstairs, he will kill Penny... those two women knuckle under. If they'd been Quakers, okay, they have a very real and understandable reason to shun violence of every sort. That would be a little bit believable. Maybe. But the way this is, with them being generic Christians? What happened to all the Bible passages about defending the helpless, for instance?
I'm sorry, but I don't care how scary a bad guy is. If he tells me to sit still and be quiet while he rapes my child, he will only be doing that over my literally dead body. And with as many injuries as I can inflict on him in a short period of time -- eye-gouging would probably go a long way to stopping him completely. As I recall, he didn't even have his gun out when he was threatening them at this point. Grandma could have thrown her cane at him to distract him while Mom went for his face with her fingernails, if nothing else. So, I lost all respect for Penny's mom and grandma right there, and it's all the writers' fault. Laredo could have tied them up. Knocked them unconscious. Killed them -- he's shooting people all over the place in the film, so I don't see why he would stop here and now. Killing them would really be the most sensible thing for him to do. We all know he's going to do that anyway, eventually. The route the writers chose is inconsistent for his character, illogical, and a wimpy writing choice.
Speaking of that ending, we gradually see that Laredo has a lot of weird sores and scars and pustules and things all over him, which I guess when tied to his chronic cough and his earlier request for mercury are supposed to point to him having syphilis. This is just not necessary, y'all. Make him Consumptive (my assumption for most of the film) and have done with the nasty VD implications. He's already a horrible character without this, AND they never tie this into ANY part of the plot, so it's not necessary in any way.
Furthermore, having the Worths just be generic Christians means that Quirt does NOT have to make a big decision about whether or not to give up violence. In the original film, he's not an outlaw who's been running around stealing gold from other outlaws, he's a guy who just got out of prison after serving time involved with avenging his dad's murder and is trying to evade the rest of his dad's killers, who are now after him. I don't mind them changing Quirt to being an actual outlaw in this movie, but making the Worths not Quakers anymore means they pull the teeth of the central question of the story: can Quirt stop relying on his own violent abilities and start relying on God to take care of him instead?
The showdown in the original revolves around that question. The showdown in this new version just revolves around "can the bad guy be stopped in time before he ravages Penny and kills her and her family." Quirt really doesn't have to give anything up, aside from deciding he's okay with being a non-cool farmer type and no longer risking getting shot while stealing gold. He doesn't get a chance to grow and change much -- his big character arc is going from caring only about himself to also caring about three or four other people. Not very interesting.
Also, whyyyyyy did the writers decide it would be a great idea to paint Marshal McClintock and his deputies as less-than-savory characters and imply they're involved in disreputable things? Can't we have an actually good, upright lawman here? There's no point to that little piece of storytelling. It felt mean.
While we're talking about things that don't make sense, HOW on earth did Laredo kill the doctor and his patient and the guy with the broken tooth, presumably by shooting them, in the middle of town in broad daylight, and nobody noticed for like a whole day? Guns aren't that quiet! That town wasn't that loud! My dudes. Think these things through.
Okay, that's enough. I did enjoy watching this movie. It's possible I'll watch it again, but mainly just for Zachary Levi and Tommy Lee Jones.
Is this movie family friendly? Uh, no. Handful of cuss words. Shooting and bloody wounds, though no graphic gore. Whores are in several scenes and referred to as such. The word 'rape' doesn't get used, but is obviously intended by more than one character on more than one occasion. It's implied that Quirt is used to bedding the sort of women who might enjoy tying a man to a bedframe.
While this wasn't bad, I definitely recommend the 1947 version. It makes sense, it's family friendly, and it's really fun. The Paramount YouTube channel provides
this excellent print for free viewing.
I think I'll watch it with my teens after supper tonight :-D
