Like most westerns, The Harder They Fall is boring. I’m not a fan of this genre due to its restrictiveness: as with the rom-com, the western’s conventions are so strict that they typically exclude significant innovation. The story of a western must play out in an extremely specific way: a good and a bad cowboy, one of whom is a newcomer of sorts, slowly build toward a showdown, and eventually the good cowboy shoots the bad cowboy dead. The end.
Having the cast be comprised of black actors is a good idea, but it ultimately doesn’t change things. We still have a swaggering villain, a climactic shootout, etc., and the pieces fall into place as they must. I should add that this movie is very long (also a hallmark of westerns), due, as usual, to the many, many threats the characters drawl at each other that don’t advance the plot in any way.
To his credit, director Jeymes Samuel seems to sense the staleness of his foundation, and he wants to jazz it up. But his efforts backfire. The story is about a certified badass outlaw (Nat Love) and his gang (RJ Cyler and Edi Gathegi), who are possibly even more badass than he is. Also, his love interest (Zazie Beetz) is without question more badass than the gang is, and they’re also helped by a sheriff (Delroy Lindo) who might be the most badass of all. Meanwhile, the man (Idris Elba) who murdered the protagonist’s parents is a legendary badass, and his badass partner in crime (Lakeith Stanfield) is the quickest draw around. And…his love interest (Regina King) is almost certainly more badass than any of them.
Do you see the problem here? Every character cannot be a badass. Badassery is a zero sum game: being a badass means that other people are not badasses. As Syndrome would say, when everyone is a badass, then no one is—it’s just the norm. Samuel has created a world in which being a mega-badass is the norm. He’s overstuffed his movie so that there are no particularly memorable moments, no focal points. What he winds up with is two plus hours of people comebacking and one-upping each other, such that who comes out on top doesn’t feel important.
Samuel has also made a number of intentionally anachronistic decisions: the hip hop score, the glamorized sets, the lack of proper accents. Again, I credit him for trying to mix it up. But the effect of these choices is to create a feeling that it’s all playacting, that it’s not to be taken seriously. It implies, actually, that accuracy of setting and of tone were never truly important components of the western: that only the characters and their motivations gave the genre its impact.
That’s an interesting theory, but it’s not right. The setting is indeed the central component of the western (hence its name) and the reason its aesthetics remain with us. We watch the classics—The Searchers, High Noon, Shane—to reacquaint ourselves with the Wild West and its idiosyncratic yet alluring set of values, but The Harder They Fall shrugs off the possibility of allowing us that glimpse of what used to be. It therefore doesn’t offer us anything from the past, only the present. And apparently, the present is full of badasses.
—Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my thoughts on Netflix’s Mank.