Rent Big Kill (2018)

Loved it - Big Kill review by AP

Really enjoyed this movie. Yes, the making is a bit cheap and cheerful and it's full of clichés but it's worth for Christoph Sanders heartwarming performance alone and I'm a sucker for a happy ending ??. PS no subtitles which might make it difficult for some to watch.

One of the Better Westerns - Big Kill review by BG

Westerns are generally a marmite thing these days, and most of them go straight onto DVD relegated as B movies. Big Kill is 2 hours long, but I didn't get bored with it. The film isn't up to some of the classics, but that doesn't stop it from becoming entertaining. There is some familiarity and predictability, but I think what carries it is a good solid story and the characters. Lou Diamond Phillips is effective as a killer in a red suit, and Jason Patric is interesting as an evil Preacher dressed entirely in black. There's sympathy for the good natured accountant, Jim, and in contrast, an unhinged woman who relishes sex and violence. There's references to Silverado, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the Italian Western, with soaring trumpet themes, and close ups of faces before the shoot outs. There's also a demonstration that those early Colt pistols were not very accurate.... even at close range.

Wow, but this is bad.. - Big Kill review by JE

Cheaply made films are often loveable but this effort is the poorest piece of cinema I have seen since the Ghosts of Mars. To be fair the sets and costumes are the best bits, even if the sets have a museum freshness to them and the costumes come out of the western dressing-up box. The acting, script, characterisation, story arc all fail in woeful ways. Even the foley work is attrocious - horses clop toward the camera out of sync with their hoof beats. From the shoddy opening shots - we literally gun down some Mexican Keystone Cops - to the poorly shot trail footage, but what am I saying, the whole movie is poorly shot, "stick the camera there, it'll do..." The acting comes off as if they'd done no rehearsals, or as if we are watching the first read through. The plot sags as unlovable misfits stumble from place to place looking for the town of Big Kill, getting into scrapes along the way.

When we get to Big Kill not everything is as it seems...  oh, no, actually Lou Diamond Phillips plays exactly the character you'd expect. He phones in an awful, gurning performance as a homicidal lawman who kills anyone and virtually everyone in town. US film and television seems to be in thrall to the idea that psychopaths rule any society where law and order has broken down. And yet anthropologists will tell you that communities round on violent individuals to control or expel them. They don't rise to the top of even the simplest social structures. But they dominate in American movies... The Walking Dead became increasingly absurd as psychopath after maniac, after violent weirdo ruled each and every settlement encountered. Almost as if the writers had an uncontrolled fetish for bad guys.

Big Kill tries hard to meet plastic western expectations - a man is thrown the length of a bar counter top, although we are on such a low budget he is actually pushed... the strawberry jam blood make a laughable scene of a cruel and unnecessary murder. Women are an afterthought; either whores or virgins. The only interesting thing about the movie is the condensing clouds of breath of the characters in the bar at night.

The 1970s gave us mud and blood westerns that strove for off-the-wall stories told with a dignity and dirty realism that made them compelling. What we have now, in an era of film schools, cheap video shooting, oodles of special effects, are poorly constructed, badly made b-movies. If you want a good western rent Lonely are the Brave... But no, they spent a lot of money making this poorly imagined and executed, weak movie. They had to cake the ageing stars in pan stick to get them through the shooting... the movie contains not a single interesting or original idea... this is lazy rubbish.

Oh, a my disc had no subtitles. Excluding two members of my family from the chance to share in the wooden dialogue.