The Harder They Fall is a new Western airing on Netflix this past week. Now, Westerns are not my favorite film genre… I certainly like some and will watch most new ones but something about the genre doesn’t click with me.
I guess it’s a crime that this movie is fictional but uses a whole cast of real life black Western lawmen and crooks and I’d only ever heard of Bass Reeves (and only then from the Watchmen tv series). I guess that’s on me… but that’s also on pop culture since I’d heard plenty of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, etc. So good on them for getting the gang together.
This is kind of an Avengers Assemble of these real life people – a mash-up that creates a fictional story that brings these people together into one bloody film. Basically a Western revenge story involving two rival gangs of outlaws (and US Marshall Reeves). Idris Elba’s gang has taken over a town and is extorting it. Jonathan Majors’ gang is out to take them down… not because it’s right, but because Elba done him wrong.
This movie oozes cool, oozes style, and it’s slick as hell. Sometimes this is one of the coolest damn things I’ve seen. Awesome (and anachronistic) soundtrack with great themes and songs add to this feeling you’re watching something special. After an opening scene, the film makes its thesis statement during the title reveal… bang, pause, bang, pause, bang. Very cool. Also cool… when they spring Idris Elba from jail and we get a simple shot of him just breathing… with the background flexing as though he just realized he was The One.
I had a number of moments where I just laughed with appreciation at the audacity and chutzpah of some of these shots. The director should be applauded and watched for his next flick.
All this is great and the movie maintains it’s cool factor about half the time. But I think at 2+ hours, it’s a little too long to maintain the pace. It sagged for me in the middle and I got a little bored. It’s not enough of a story and I didn’t feel there was enough humanity in the characters to connect to them. Which is a real problem when it goes for some unearned pathos in a monolog from Elba near the end.
But there’s still enough cool in the movie that I’m reviewing it slightly better than I thought I would when I sat down to write this. I suspect people who love Westerns will love this flick more.
Score: 86