From the ‘80s all the way to the early 2010s, Nicolas Cage was one of the most popular actors in all of Hollywood. I became a fan of his after watching Con Air and Face/Off on a loop because they were on TV all the time. But while most of his films were released on the big screen first until 2013, he turned a page in 2014 and didn’t stop starring in direct-to-video movies until 2017. Many were perplexed as to why Cage was tarnishing his image like that, but I think he didn’t shy away from admitting that he was doing it to pay the bills—bills with a lot of zeros in them. It seemed like he was en route to starting a new era by featuring in projects like Mandy, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Pig. And he kind of did. Nowadays, while he does show up in highly popular IPs like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Dream Scenario, and Longlegs, he continues to make appearances in stuff like Gunslingers. So, yeah, let’s talk about it; both him and the film.
Brian Skiba’s Gunslingers opens in New York, 1903, where brothers Thomas and Robert Keller get into a fight with a gang over some kind of an artifact, possibly a map. Robert gets horribly burned during the process, and Thomas, thinking that Robert is dead, takes off with the item that seemingly everyone is after. Four years later, Thomas reaches Kentucky, and after thwarting a bunch of trigger-happy idiots, he reaches a town called Redemption. After delivering the map to Jericho, who seems to be the head honcho of the place, Thomas is hanged till death and then buried. Except he is very much alive, since the whole concept of Redemption is that it’s a safe haven for those who are wanted by the law and bounty hunters because, on paper, these criminals are dead, but in reality, they are living a life of merriment and fun. All this is jeopardized when Valerie Keller, along with her daughter Grace and a bruised (both physically and psychologically) Robert, comes looking for them and finds out that there’s big money to be earned from Redemption, accompanied by a healthy dose of revenge.
To be honest, I really like the premise of Gunslingers. I am not an expert on Westerns, but out of all the movies that I have watched, even those that don’t quite fall in the genre, I don’t think I have ever come across this kind of a story. Sure, I have seen outlaws, convicts, and all kinds of criminals roaming the Wild West. But a town called Redemption where people who have been wrongfully or correctly accused of a felony get a second chance at life and then fight tooth and nail for it because some genius wants to collect all the bounty that’s on these residents’ heads is so interesting! It opens the door for so many philosophical conversations and ethical questions about human nature, self-correction, greed, religion, and more. However, Skiba isn’t really interested in all that, or maybe he is not equipped to get into all that heady stuff. Everything in the plot is an excuse for him to start a gunfight, which is fine because, ultimately, it’s his movie. However, since the stakes are really low and the plot twists are incredibly sparse, said gunfights get very repetitive very quickly.
Credit where credit is due, I think Skiba’s ambition for Gunslingers is commendable. The amount of fake ammo, fire-based stunts, normal stunts, wire-based stunts, shattered windows, breakable furniture, horses, high-volume sprinklers, and many other rigs and tricks that have been employed to make this relentless battle between the felons and the bounty hunters feel believable is insane. Sure, there’s no sense of geography, emotional weight, or anything synonymous with a memorable gunfight. But, you have to give it to Skiba and his team for trying. With all that said, what’s really unforgivable about the film is the use of generative A.I. It’s in the first shot of the movie! And the weird thing is that Skiba doesn’t utilize that “technology” again in the film—or at least I didn’t notice it—which makes you wonder why he used it at all. I mean, a movie like Weapon (the one with Sathyaraj) has copious amounts of generative A.I. So, you can lambast it for being lazy. However, in Skiba’s case, he has gone to great lengths to shoot real action sequences and whatnot. So, why resort to that maligned, anti-art software just for one establishing shot? It seems like a minor thing, but if you have seen how eager big studios are to sideline actual artists and bring in generative AI, then you know that these small acts of cutting corners are setting up a slippery slope.
When it comes to the acting, I think the cast of Gunslingers is fine. Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham, Tzi Ma, William McNamara, and Costas Mandylor are veterans in this business. Sure, they know that they aren’t going to win any awards for this film, but they don’t sleepwalk through their roles; they commit, and that’s impressive. Jeremy Kent Jackson, as the big bad of the movie, is quite scary. Randall Batinkoff, Cooper Barnes, Scarlet Rose Stallone (yes, that’s Sly Stallone’s daughter), Bre Blair, Forrest Wilder, Laurie Love, and the rest of the supporting cast are alright. But, of course, no one stands a chance to shine when Nicolas Cage is in the house. To be clear, Cage’s work as Ben amounts to a glorified cameo. However, he makes sure that he is giving the cast, crew, and the audience everything he’s got. At this point, you know that if you don’t restrain this dude, he’s going to swing for the fences. Does that make him predictable, though? Yes and no. Yes, you are aware of the fact that he is going to do something wild, but you can’t anticipate how wild he is going to be. I guess he was told that his character was on the spectrum, and that’s it; and then he just went to town with that basic idea. His sunglasses are cool, though, and I want them.
If you can ignore the generative A.I., the color grading, the action choreography, the editing, and just the general lack of budget, Gunslingers is watchable. I mean, at the very least, Tzi Ma’s wig and Nicolas Cage’s oddball performance are going to get a few laughs out of you. Jokes apart, though, I seriously want to know why Tzi Ma and Nicolas Cage still need to do movies like this. Tzi Ma was in Invincible, Interior Chinatown, Kung Fu, The Kid Detective, Mulan, Wu Assassins, Veep, and The Farewell. In addition to the aforementioned projects, Nicolas Cage has starred in Renfield, The Croods: A New Age, Color Out of Space, and Teen Titans GO! To the Movies, and he is set to appear in Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and Spider-Noir. What are they doing with the money they are getting from these projects? Are their agents not good at negotiating with producers, are they bad at saving money, or is inflation in the USA mind-blowingly high? Or do I have it all wrong, and these guys are doing these direct-to-video films for the fun of the game? I don’t know. If you have the answer to my questions, let me know in the comments section below.
