Writer: Carl W.Lucas
Director: Brett Donowho
The Old Way certainly lives up to its name and is an old-fashioned Western about vengeance. Nicholas Cage must seek out the violent gang that kills his wife, and he takes along his 12-year-old daughter for the ride. The set-up has echoes of Luc Besson’s Léon where another 12-year-old girl learns how to shoot a gun, but Brett Donowho’s Western lacks the vibrancy of Besson’s thriller from 1994. Instead, The Old Way is slow and predictable.
Located in a time where the Wild West is not as wild anymore, marshals now range across the landscape trying to keep order where once there was lawlessness. In the pursuit of his wife’s killer, Cage’s character Briggs wants unadulterated revenge but the marshal tells him that he should wait for federal justice to do its job and bring the killer to trial. Of course, Briggs will ignore this command, and must try to reach the killer before the marshal does.
Briggs isn’t easy to like. He’s surly and short-tempered, and seems to resent the presence of his daughter either when she’s in the shop that he runs or when she accompanies him on his trek across the desert to wreck his revenge. He was once a cold-hearted killer, but his wife turned him into a family man. However, with his wife dead, he can pick up his old ways, and also teach them to his daughter.
As in any road movie, the travellers bond along the journey and here, on horseback, father and daughter begin to understand each other and realise that perhaps they aren’t so different after all. Both appear to lack empathy and if this film were set in the present day there would be discourse around spectrums and neurodiversity. But here Briggs says that his lack of fear and emotions makes him feel dead inside. And it also helps him become an efficient killer. Could Brooke follow in her father’s footsteps? A rhetorical question, at best.
Cage is perfectly fine in his role, but he doesn’t really have to do much apart from remain distant and cool. It’s a role as old as the Wild West itself. More interesting is his enemy James McCallister played by a lively Noah Le Gros, who adds rakish charm, his bandana always perfectly tied, to his character. McCallister is seeking his own revenge, as 20 years previously Briggs shot dead his father in front of him, then a young boy. Despite the fact that both men are after retribution, it seems as if writer Carl W. Lucas’s sympathy lies with Briggs, and his daughter. Ryan Kiera Armstrong puts in a good performance as Brooke, but her character is as cold as Cage’s.
If the story is predictable at least Donowho (whose last film starred Bruce Willis) provides a clean and crisp land of blue skies and ochre deserts, ensuring that The Old Way definitely looks good on the screen. The generic score, by Andrew Morgan Smith, evokes Westerns of the past and helps to give the impression that this film is from another decade, or even century. For those who like the safety of Westerns, where the narratives are familiar, The Old Way will not shock with any undue surprises.
But Westerns can also provide commentary on ideas of America and its legitimacy. Seeing desperate people live outside the law and democracy may remind viewers of the final days of Trump’s presidency, but this film wants us to take the side of those who fight against civilization and order. And that may be too difficult for all audiences to swallow.
The Old Way is in UK & Irish Cinema And Digital Release From 13 January.
