THE OLD WAY: Nicolas Cage Does A Cowboy Impression

Watching a Nicolas Cage movie is like opening Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, “you never know what you’re gonna get”. There are really only four outcomes; the first is he will do something really bold in a really bad movie and it doesn’t work. The second is he will do something really bold in a really good movie and it still doesn’t work. The third is he will do something really bold in a really bad movie and he seems brave for his interesting choices, and the fourth is he will do something really bold in a really good movie and it’s magic. Nicolas Cage‘s first trip into western territory The Old Way is a bit of the first and a bit of the third. He definitely made bold choices in a really bad movie and sometimes it works but more often than not it just falls flat.

The film was directed by Brett Donowho from a screenplay by Carl W. Lucas and they really made an attempt to put the fire back into a slowly declining genre but it missed the mark. As The Old Way opens, we are witness to the event that will set the first of two revenge stories in motion. Colton Briggs (Cage) is standing guard as lawmen are set to hang a man for his debts, the man’s young son is present and when the accused’s posse shows up, a gunfight breaks out. With everyone dead and the man now free, Briggs takes what he’s owed. When the man attempts to get the drop on Briggs he catches a bullet with his forehead for the trouble. We instantly are meant to understand that Briggs is a quick gun and that man’s son is going to grow up and seek his revenge.

The movie then jumps twenty years into the future, they don’t let us in on this fact, Briggs has shaved his mustache so we are supposed to know this instinctively, to find Colton with a wife and young daughter. Kerry Knuppe is Ruth Briggs, the strong and determined wife, while Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Firestarter 2022) plays their daughter, Brooke. Brooke is in every way the best part of this movie, matching the energy of everyone she shares a scene with. Brooke is late for school and Ruth lets Colton know that it’s his job to walk her there before he opens the family store. The dynamic between Armstrong and Cage is hard to ignore, their chemistry was pretty magical throughout the film. With the school teacher out sick (they never tell us why, probably the pox), Brooke is forced to spend the day with her dad at the store. It’s during this time that Briggs’ past catches up to him when a group of bandits, lead by James McCallister (Noah Le Gros), the boy from the beginning now grown, turn up on the family farm looking for blood. The group is made up of a great cast of character actors like Clint Howard and Abraham Benrubi. I don’t think I have to tell you what happens next, Ruth is murdered obviously, which sets off the second revenge story in the same film. That leads to a third act that is all chase down and kill in the style of every western movie that came before it.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The film clearly had a shoestring budget and they managed to get every dollar of that on screen. The locations that they used were absolutely beautiful, some of the shots even looked like period mid-western paintings. A few of the performances were really strong, I mentioned Armstrong earlier, she was fantastic but out of the adults that came to play the best by far was, Nick Searcy as Marshal Jarret. He was the only one of the adult actors that could be pulled out and plucked down into any of the perfect westerns of the past and be right at home. Though his performance was rough, when Cage shared the screen with Armstrong he seemed to elevate himself to her level. She made him look good and their relationship was actually kind of sweet.

Other than the few I just mentioned the rest of the performances were uneven and dull. It was as if your dad was in the backyard pretending to be a cowboy with all the cringe that comes with that; bad accent, overacting, completely unaware that someone was filming him and about to upload it to TikTok. The story itself was predictable and when it was given the opportunity to subvert those tropes it leaned into them even harder. The movie made me laugh out loud more than once in places that it wasn’t their intention that I laugh. Honestly, with a small rewrite, this movie could have been a very successful western comedy, not Blazing Saddles funny, but pretty funny nonetheless. It would have made more sense.

Conclusion:

There IS a movie in there somewhere. I don’t know if they just needed more time or if they felt like they had gold on their hands but it could have benefited from one more trip through the drafting phase. As it stood it seems as if someone entered the prompt of, “western double revenge story during father/daughter time,” into ChatGPT and just called it good. It wasn’t a waste of time, it WAS fun seeing Nicolas Cage in a western finally (what took so long) but it wasn’t the savior of the genre I was hoping for either. The movie isn’t very long, at about 95 minutes, so for Ryan Kiera Armstrong‘s performance alone, it’s worth a look. She showed up and gave it her all, she was sweet and funny and convincing and none of what went wrong here was her fault. Who knows, they did leave it open to being revisited later. In ten or fifteen years it might be fun to catch up with her and see what Brooke is up to. Now THAT is a movie I would look forward to.

The Old Way was released in theaters on January 6, 2023 and On Demand on January 13, 2023!

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