If you like Westerns as much as I do, don’t see The Old Way with Nicolas Cage. It’s Western sausage with every possible cliché ground in to make it look like other Westerns and no distinction other than it’s the Oscar winner’s first Western. Grade C beef, tasteless inside and out.
Colton Briggs (Cage), ex super gunfighter, sets out with his 12-year-daughter, Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), to avenge the murder of his sweet wife, Ruth (Kerry Knuppe). If you hear echoes of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, forget it, for only in superficial plot can The Old Way claim kinship.
Accompanying Briggs on his revenge is his possibly autistic Brooke (she counts individual jelly beans for same color jars), who reminds of True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld character but with less impressive lines. Keep an eye on Armstrong, for she could be a formidable adult actress. By the way, you’ll not be surprised at the role Brooke plays here, formulaic as the film is.
Other characters are just as unimpressive: villain James McCallister (Noah Le Gros) reminds me of a frat boy without a promising future, and Marshal Jarret (Nick Searcy) is an ineffectual blowhard, to name two undistinguished players in this listless oater.
Perhaps the most interesting element of the horse opera is that the head armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was armorer for Alec Baldwin’s Rust, on which set was a death and a serious injury related to the handling of guns two months after The Old Way. Even spicier is that Cage allegedly walked off this set because of the armorer’s handling of guns.
Sion Michel’s cinematography is in the best beautiful Western tradition, and director Brett Donowho does some magic with Armstrong’s acting and keeping Cage to his vaunted method acting. These are not reasons to see this bland genre piece except that it makes devotees like me remember the excellence of revenge Western’s like Unforgiven.
The Old Way
Director: Brett Donowho (Acts of Violence)
Screenplay: Carl W. Lucas (The Wave)
Cast: Nicolas Cage (Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Firestarter)
Run Time: 1h 35m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
