What a year for westerns 2015 was. In “Bone Tomahawk” and “The Hateful Eight” we were gifted two frontier tales that violated the genre’s tropes with attitude, but retained a sense of respect for where they found their roots. Being as dated as it is, the western has to keep evolving in order to keep up, which can be difficult when the genre is so clearly rooted in traditionalist values. Rocking out of Sundance with little buzz and middling reactions, the appeal of “Outlaws and Angels” appears to be that it’s shot on 35mm film, a process that director JT Mollner champions. However, outside of this conceit, it’s hard to think of exactly who ‘Outlaws’ appeals to.
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Traditionally told for the most part, at first it may feel like one for the revivalists. Bounty hunters are tracking down a gang of criminals who robbed a local bank and are now on the run. The film wastes no time in letting us know that one of the hunters is played by Luke Wilson, as it introduces his instantly recognizable face in a rather incongruous quick pan, more in line with a celebrity walking through the door in a sitcom than a fictional character introduction. Despite Wilson’s star power, the movie centers on the gang, led by a moody, mumbling Chad Michael Murray as Henry, a bearded wolf of a man backed up by a comically overweight buffoon – the first of the film’s many questionable excuses for comedy – and a nutcase with rotten teeth who is mighty quick to cock his gun.
But once the gang invade a family home and the movie’s central setting is established, ‘Outlaws’ starts to feel more like one for the midnight crowd, with a setup that is cheaply imitative of “The Hateful Eight” with claustrophobic spaces and an equal amount of brash, overstated humor mixed with gross-out violence, but without any of the stylistic panache that made the maximalist conceits of ‘Eight’ work so incredibly well. The family are the other central characters here, but none of them feel very well-drawn out. The mother figure is a bible-thumping screamer who’s intermittent yelling will have you laughing at the wrong times, while the father doesn’t get much of an arc beyond asking his daughters for “rubdowns” each night, an act that is one of the least morally questionable parts of the film’s continual descent into B-movie territory. A long night ensues as the daughters are taken into rooms by the men, and a seriously false romantic connection forms between Henry and the 15-year-old Florence (Francesca Eastwood), who is – not to give too much away – a lot smarter than she initially seems.
There is violence in the house too, with heavily stylized blood splatter backed up by amateurish editing that makes the budgetary limitations much more obvious than they could have been with a sharper touch. Later, both incest and rape are played for comedy, and both feel just as unearned as the other. What “The Hateful Eight” did in its Samuel L. Jackson rape monologue was make it just unbelievable enough that our laughter crept through the fingers covering our mouths, but here Mollner directs the scene with a gritty realism that belies the smirking provocativeness of what he’s trying to capture, and it makes for a scene that is not only uncomfortable to sit through but awkward in pacing and tone. Pair this with a slow-motion bloody beating out of the blue and you have the film’s worst section, clearly driven by Mollner’s desire to shock instead of entertain, and it leaves a stain on what was, up to that point, a fairly passable period western.
So how could it then feel earned when the last 30 minutes shift gears into Mollner’s idea of a feminist western, complete with femme-fatale cowgirls and some symbolically interesting but heavy-handed visualizations of emasculation? Luke Wilson’s character provides some voiceover narration that could be pulled from whatever Terrence Malick is cooking up, and lens flares become Mollner’s fixation — one of the only moments where the 35mm really shines. It’s a tonal shift that feels unintentionally jarring, and I get the feeling we are supposed to believe the film’s musings on amorality are a justification for the way Mollner played us for shock.
In trying to include as much as it does, ‘Outlaws’ finds itself as more of tonal soup than a cohesive narrative feature. Is it a traditional western? Is it a satire? Or maybe a transgressive meditation on women’s power? Truthfully, it feels like none of these, and no amount of technical proficiency or fancy 35mm film stock can hide what ends up as a false, if not exhausting, mix of disparate ideas. [D]