Gunslingers, 2025.
Written and Directed by Brian Skiba.
Starring Stephen Dorff, Nicolas Cage, Costas Mandylor, Heather Graham, Scarlet Stallone, Bre Blair, William McNamara, Randall Batinkoff, Tzi Ma, Cooper Barnes, Mitchell Hoog, Elisabetta Fantone, Jeremy Kent Jackson, Mohamed Karim, Laurie Love, Dan O’Brien, Brooklen Wilkes, Ava Monroe Tadross, Forrest Wilder, Forrie J. Smith, Kartuah Chapman, Hunter Bines, Francis Cronin, Matthew Daniel Stevens, Eric Mabius, and Taylor Bines.
SYNOPSIS:
When the most wanted man in America surfaces in a small Kentucky town, his violent history – and a blood-thirsty mob seeking vengeance and a king’s ransom – soon follow. As brothers face off against one another and bullets tear the town to shreds, this lightning-fast gunslinger makes his enemies pay the ultimate price for their greed.
Writer/director Brian Skiba works fast, here cranking out generic action regularly, with his latest, Gunslingers, the second Western of the bunch. It’s faint praise, but this might be his best film, if only because Nicolas Cage refuses to phone it in. That also doesn’t mean he is giving a good performance, but in a town of wanted criminals who have moved on from that life and want to live peacefully, now finding themselves at odds with an enemy looking to cash in on that bounty, the prolific veteran actor injects some personality into an otherwise lifeless slog playing Ben, a Bible thumper with a horse voice (bordering on barely being able to speak) wearing cross-shaped shades.
It’s a common observation that sometimes one actor is in a completely different movie than everyone else, but that is taken to the extreme here. The gist is that the unreasonable sociopathic Robert Keller (Jeremy Kent Jackson, rightly playing the character as violently crazed out of his mind to compensate for how little there is on the page) has been tasked with bringing his brother Thomas (Stephen Dorff) back to New York to face punishment for a justifiable crime, lest there be consequences.
Thomas finds himself holed up in a saloon alongside the previously mentioned Ben and many other patrons indistinguishable from the next. The only characters that remotely stand out are the owner, Jericho (Costas Mandylor), and his bartending daughter, Bella (Scarlet Stallone). Shortly before this, Val (Heather Graham) enters the saloon with her daughter, looking to tell Thomas something important, implying a past connection and having escaped Robert’s clutches.
For almost an hour, Brian Skiba repeats the same action sequence of characters firing bullets at one another from inside and outside the saloon, typically only concerned with watching the trigger pulled and cutting to a death. Some of the deaths, such as falling off a building awning, are repeated. So many generic henchmen are killed that it becomes evident that the reason their faces are obscured with bandannas is so the filmmaker can film the same actors dying over and over, like a video game that ran out of budget to create different enemy models. Again, the only source of entertainment here is Nicolas Cage shouting (as much as his voice allows him) about Jesus and faith, looking ridiculous while doing so. Even that is hampered by laughable sound effects and inconsistent color grading that looks washed out and changes within the same scene.
Unsurprisingly, there is clichéd and predictable drama between these brothers that gradually reveals itself toward the end, but most will likely be checked out by then. That’s also a slight shame since once Gunslingers leaves the saloon, it turns out that Brian Skiba does have a touch of creativity for the final set piece, which involves characters trying to take out villains while also trying to keep others alive following a noose-hanging attempt. It’s moderately inspired and gives Nicolas Cage more room to get crazy. Sometimes that wackiness could be transferred into a legitimately interesting character, but generally, when that’s all the movie has going for it, it says everything that needs to be said about the quality of the film.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
