Review: 'The Harder They Fall' is a slick, stylish Western that changes the genre's hero myths to reflect Black lives back then
One might suspect musician-turned-filmmakaer Jeymes Samuel of cribbing from the Quentin Tarantino playbook in “The Harder They Fall,” and certainly this slick Western ticks many of the same boxes.
Dynamic camerawork? Check. Florid mile-a-minute dialogue? Check. Action set pieces as creative as they are violent? Check. Music drops that seem out of place, but end up fitting in perfectly? Check. Deploying historical figures in ways history never did? Check.
The first recognizable difference between Samuel’s approach and Tarantino’s turns out to be a critical one: With Samuels, when someone starts using the “N-word,” Regina King’s character shoots them dead before they finish the first syllable.
This turns out to be a crucial difference, though. Where Tarantino plays with ideas of racism to stir up trouble, Samuel is trying to create a new Western mythology — with Black heroes and villains, based on real figures of the Old West, leading the way.
First we meet the villain, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), a cold-blooded killer who opens the movie by killing a preacher and his wife, and putting a cross-shaped scar on their son’s forehead.
That boy comes back in view as a grown man, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), an outlaw who doesn’t rob banks, but instead robs the gangs that rob the banks. Love also has hunted down the men who assisted Buck when he killed Love’s parents — until Buck’s the only one left.
Getting to Buck will be difficult, though. He runs his own town, and has a gang of nasty killers on his side, including King’s character, saloon operator Trudy Smith, and the quick-shooting Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield).
But Love has his own ride-or-die gang, including the fast-draw champ Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler), rifle-toting Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi), the androgynous but hard-fighting Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler), and the toughest one of all — saloon magnate Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), who’s also Love’s ex. And there’s someone else, the cagey marshal Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo), who has designs on ending Buck’s reign.
Samuel — who, under the name The Bullitts, is a respected music producer who worked with Jay-Z as a music consultant on Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” — stages action scenes with the fast cadence and insistent beats of a good rap song. There’s never nothing happening in the movie, which can be exciting to watch, but also a little exhausting sometimes. Even at over two hours, there’s almost no room here to breathe.
Samuel and co-screenwriter Boaz Yakin (“Now You See Me”) also give the cast pages and pages of smart, sharp dialogue to chew up and spit out. My favorite line comes early, in the scene where King’s Trudy is leading a train heist and shoots the engineer who starts to call her the “N-word.” Cherokee Bill wryly suggests that Trudy was hasty. “He might have been calling you a nincompoop,” Bill says.
The cast is powerful, individually and as a group. Let’s single out just the ringleaders: Elba cements his badass image as the ruthless Buck, and Majors shows, as he did in HBO’s “Lovecraft Country,” that he has the heart and charisma to be a leading man.
There is symbolism, sometimes none too subtle. At one point, someone has to rob a bank in a nearby all-white town. When Samuel’s camera arrives, it certainly is white — every building is whitewashed as if Tom Sawyer tricked an entire town into painting it. It’s an in-your-face metaphor for the racism our heroes and anti-heroes face in the Old West, and Samuel proves in “The Harder They Fall” that being in one’s face is a faster way to get the message across than the Pony Express.
——
‘The Harder They Fall’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 22, in theaters everywhere; available for streaming starting November 3 on Netflix. Rated R for strong violence and language. Running time: 130 minutes.