Stream It or Skip It: ‘The Stolen’ on Netflix, A Female-Fronted Western Starring Alice Eve

The Stolen, now streaming on Netflix, is an extraordinarily rare breed of movie: a female-fronted Western. Alice Eve plays a la-di-da Briton forced to soil her skirts in backwoods New Zealand during the 19th-century gold rush when men, not dingoes, snatch her baby. Whether she survives the hairy endeavor is a foregone conclusion. The more adroit question is whether she does so with her manicure unscuffed — or if we can be coaxed into caring.

THE STOLEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: South Island, NZ, 1882. Charlotte Lockton (Eve) is getting a lesson in handling a shotgun by her husband (Lukas Hinch), and no, that’s not a euphemism. She’s already pregnant anyway. They’ve recently moved to the country to live on an estate with maids and groundskeepers, and he thinks she’ll need a little frontierspersonship under her belt in case a title card reads THREE MONTHS LATER and bandits bust into their house and kill him and steal her baby boy, which is exactly what happens. They spent a bunch of dough on preening the bejeezus out of their back garden; shoulda ponied up for a security guard, I guess?

Three months of black mourning dresses pass, and in the mail arrives a ransom note, which she traces to Gold Town, which is a train ride to a scuzz town plus a two-week over-hill-and-dale trek away. So she puts on her velvetiest riding bonnet, hikes up her knickers and does what she must with no help whatsoever, even though she could afford some? She encounters drunks, the shoeless and — gasp — SUFFRAGISTS before she hops a covered wagon with three prostitutes, a couple guys with gristle in their beards, a leering creep and an indigenous stereotype.

Charlotte learns a thing or two along the way, most importantly: One, don’t leave your large sums of cash unattended, although she ends up not really needing it anyway, I guess; and two, how to shoot a gun, which won’t come in handy in the third act, since all Westerns end in a hail of peaceful handshakes. She arrives in Gold Town, which is a campground with a saloon-slash-“entertainment venue” where she falls in with her travel companions, Honey (Emily Corcoran), Flamenco (Mikaela Ruegg) and Heather (Gillian MacGregor), and is expected to do as her travel companions do, but doesn’t, because she’s got a sophisticated Englishman saloon owner (Jack Davenport) and his asshair enforcer (Cohen Holloway) to contend with on the way to finding her baby, baby.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Stolen is Meek’s Cutoff meets Unforgiven minus the subtext and most of the A+ filmmaking.

Performance Worth Watching: Alice Eve has a magnetic presence and convincing tone despite being given a blandly written character to play, and god help me, she looks so much like Reese Witherspoon, I keep expecting her to go full metal Four Christmases at any moment.

Memorable Dialogue: “Twenty percent or I glue me bloomers to me arse!” — Honey negotiates her piece of change from the whorehouse operator

Sex and Skin: Just implications of fornicatin’ ‘n’ such.

Our Take: So you’ve got a female lead for your Western. Would you be content to squander the opportunity by employing every cornball cliche the genre has to offer? No? Well, The Stolen sure is fine with the typical poshie-leaves-her-bubble-and-learns-the-world-is-full-of-tough-SOBs-so-she’s-gotta-be-one-too plot, its every development and twist arriving right on schedule, its every character plucked halfheartedly from central casting. The whores have hearts of gold, the token indigenous character (casual racism alert) is a “noble savage” and the bad guys don’t reveal their true natures right away, but the truth is so obvious, they might as well.

Eve is given a lead character with no inner life, just the most basic compulsion to get her baby back. I mean, it’s obvious that any mother would be deeply, biologically and intellectually compelled to rescue her child from danger and reunite with him, so why should the movie bother to underscore that intensity or make it interesting, when we’ll do all the work for it? That would just be stating the obvious. Our emotional engagement is minimal, and the film plays out with all the righteous drama of a Quick Draw McGraw cartoon. I can confirm The Stolen exists — and exists to be as boring as possible.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Stolen is a lazy, lazy movie, bereft of style or anything interesting to say.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Stolen on Netflix