89 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Lionsgate
An aging gunslinger rides with a U.S. marshal and a deputy to hunt the outlaws who shot his son and took his land. Three men, one trail, one revenge plot you have seen a hundred times. The horses give the best performances.
Britt MacMasters is a frontier marshal whose son lies wounded and whose ranch sits in the hands of the men who shot him. He sets out with Sheriff Wilkins and an old tracker named Dex to run the killers down. The film wants to be a classic revenge western built on grief and duty. What it delivers is a thin chase across open country with stops for gunfire and exposition. Every story beat arrives exactly when you expect it and lands with no weight.
Jay Pickett plays Britt MacMasters with a flat stoicism that never opens into real grief. He says the lines and rides the horse and the inner life stays locked away. Peter Facinelli plays Sheriff Wilkins as a stock lawman and finds no angle that distinguishes him from a hundred other deputies. Tom Skerritt turns up as the grizzled Dex for a handful of scenes and reads his dialogue like a man waiting for the day to end. Gattlin Griffith plays the outlaw Jed Blake as a one-note menace with no motive beyond the plot’s need for a villain.
Michael Feifer directs from a Jerry Robbins script that mistakes silence for tension. The dialogue states feelings instead of dramatizing them, and characters announce their intentions before they act on them. The cinematography frames the landscape in flat midday light that drains the country of mood and depth. The editing cuts between coverage with no rhythm, so conversations stall and shootouts lose their geography. The score swells on cue and tells you what to feel because the images refuse to.
This is a western that goes through the motions and hopes the genre carries the rest. The revenge has no heat. The pursuit has no stakes. Pickett’s stillness in the lead role reads as a man who has lost interest in the chase, and the film around him never gives the audience a reason to keep watching it.