People far smarter than me can speak to the cultural significance of inverting racist expectations or, alternatively, whether the western itself is so inherently tainted that slapping a fresh coat of paint on the wagon doesn’t cover the Native blood on the wheels. It is a redrawing of a classic painting, a still-life of a familiar subject in spray-painted graffiti. It is not clip art of made from other artists or a sequence of references shaped to look like a movie. But while there is a respect for the genre’s predecessors, The Harder They Fall doesn’t feel trapped within its own homage. Samuel drops needles and cuts jumps as well as any Quentin or Edgar out there. I’m sorry, do you not want to watch Elba as a near-mythical death dealer, King as his hard-as-nails tortured beloved, Majors as either a good bad guy or a bad good guy, and Stanfield as a methodical murderer? It’s amazing what you can get away with when you have a cast this good. The limited narrative twists aren’t so much real reveals or true surprises but refreshing-enough wrinkles. It’s all posturing and monologuing, explicit exposition, and lightning blam blams: a trifecta of fun executed at ten paces. The whole thing is little more than the promise of gunfights followed by gunfights themselves. Like a perversion of a Newtonian law of physics, the magnetism that relentlessly pulls future duelists towards one another is what holds Westerns together like gravity. Beckworth is on a collision course with Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield), much in the same way that Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz) is destined to square up with Trudy Smith (Regina King). Both posses are peppered with pistoleers, like Jim Beckworth (RJ Cyler), whose declaration that he’s “lightning with the blam blams” is an early verbal contract promising that the film will, indeed, be a goddamned delight. Even if it’s a bit heavy on the flair and light on substance, there’s nothing wrong with being “All hat, no cattle” when the hat looks cute AF and red meat is bad for you.Ī revenge tale that essentially rides the rails straight from point A to point B, only stopping to toot a wicked whistle now and again, The Harder They Fall follows Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) and his gang on a quest for revenge against Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) and his loyal malcontents.
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But the whole thing feels vibrant, fresh, and new, thanks to a focus on real-life historical Black outlaws and a heaping helping of style from writer/director Jeymes Samuel. Sure, cowboy cliches and tropes of revenge, fame, and peril frolic through fields like untamed, unsaddled mustangs. But I’ve got good news for anyone who has ever slurped a spaghetti-western, eaten up an oater, or injected a shoot-em-up: The Harder They Fall is the absolute shit. Hell, they aren’t even technically for horses.