InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 1

FILM REVIEWS
young daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) joins him on his quest for
retribution.
A generous reading might note that The Old Way’s tale of guilt and
exorcising past demons can at times feel akin to something like
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, but while the always-game Cage is
more than capable of imbuing some genuine pathos into his
character, the final product lacks the emotional weight and
necessary grit of finer Westerns. In fairness, repurposing
recognizable narratives and tropes isn’t an uncommon approach
to the Western construction, so the failure to build something
novel here isn’t a flaw that necessarily weighs the film down. The
bigger problem, then, is that The Old Way is too often just plain
boring, with little drama or tension to drive the film forward or no
distinctive personality to sell the material. It simply plods along
to its obvious destination — the climactic showdown.
In addition to the film’s underwhelming action and largely stale
dialogue, there’s the problem that McAllister simply isn’t an even
remotely interesting villain. He is neither the cruel and ruthless
sadist of so many yesteryear Westerns, nor is he a flawed but
genuinely sympathetic character to which viewers can relate.
Rather, he’s just a tired, cookie-cutter outlaw. Littered amongst
all of this retread are moments of appealing stillness, respites
where we glimpse human moments between father and daughter
and where the film manages to deliver a few genuinely heartfelt
scenes and sequences, but it’s simply not enough. Most of the
time, viewers are left to ponder what a shame it is that, despite
the resurgence of quality work Cage has been turning in for a
while now, this was the best Western he could get his hands on.
— OLIVER PARKER
DIRECTOR: Brett Donowho CAST: Nicolas Cage, Ryan Kiera
Armstrong, Noah Le Gros, Nick Searcy, Clint Howard
DISTRIBUTOR: Saban Films IN THEATERS: January 6
STREAMING: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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