Rent Slow West (2015)

Romeo & Juliet Versus Django! - Slow West review by Count Otto Black

In some quarters this film has been praised to the skies, but it doesn't seem to be making any massive waves. That's because it's the kind of movie a certain breed of film critics of the more refined sort automatically love, but most people see as pretentious. That's not to say it's without good qualities. It often looks beautiful, it's trying really hard, and sometimes it works.

Then again, sometimes it doesn't. Director John Maclean provides a peculiar introduction which I honestly think he may have recorded when he was stoned, given his borderline incoherence, and the fact that he seems to think he had to go to New Zealand to find a gap between rocks exactly big enough to be blocked by a buffalo skeleton (a visual detail which has precisely nothing to do with the plot). But his belief that avoiding obvious western clichés makes his film totally ground-breaking is just plain wrong, especially as he doesn't really do so. Hard-boiled world-weary tough guy teaming up with naïve innocent and thus regaining touch with his humanity? Gee, that's never been done before! See in particular "True Grit", specifically the recent Coen brothers remake, to which this movie is so indebted that it directly homages that scene where a completely irrelevant anonymous dead guy is discovered so that a joke can be made about it. In the case of the Coens, it's a very clever reference to an earlier scene homaging another film that most viewers won't get, plus a really good one-liner so that everybody laughs whether they got the more subtle underlying gag or not. In the case of John Maclean, it's a jarringly anachronistic reference to the Darwin Awards.

Much of the movie suffers from the same problem. I'm pretty sure that upper-class Scotsmen in 1870 never said "You're always dissing me!"; and when the cynical badass character meekly leaves his gun on the counter of a shop just because an unarmed storekeeper tells him it's a condition of browsing, events unfold precisely as if he was the helpless puppet of a wildly implausible script. According to the director it's supposed to be "dreamlike", but that kind of vibe doesn't work unless you know how to achieve internal consistency. Alternating between fairly direct Tarentinoesque quotes from every movie, western or otherwise, that you think is cool, and drifting off into stylized overacting and a ludicrously symbolic plot that wears its politically correct heart on its sleeve is not the way to do it.

John Maclean obviously knows how to make his films look pretty, but has trouble choosing good scripts. The much more industry-savvy Michael Fassbender clearly knows it, and is on autopilot here, picking up his cheque for a lazily generic performance and moving swiftly on. By the way, at no point in the film do the protagonists travel significantly more slowly than they would in any other western whose characters are required to go a long way on horseback, so the Daffy Duck title makes no sense whatsoever, unless you're a director so stoned that you think it does.

Slow West for a Slow Brain - Slow West review by BE

What a very silly film. One star for the scenery. Apart from that, very missable with a storyline beyond belief.

Worth a watch - Slow West review by vs

Loved this film with its many references to other classic westerns and to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Filming is beautiful and it is one of those rare films which I just didn't want to end. However, the dialogue and references were sometimes anachronistic and this jarred but it didn't detract from my enjoyment of the film. I found the ending unbelievable but I think this was deliberate and the director emphasising that it is a story afterall.