Stream It Or Skip It: ‘News of the World’ on VOD, a Tom Hanks Western That’ll Plod its Way Into Your Heart

Now on VOD, News of the World stars Tom Hanks as a man who does the right thing. Of course. It’s a role smack in the Hanks strike zone: A Civil War vet who makes an honest living moseying across Texas reading the news to folks. And when he comes across an orphaned girl, what’s he supposed to do, just go against type and leave her there? Captain Phillips director Paul Greengrass teams up with Hanks again, this time for a Western that promises some good old-fashioned storytelling. Now let’s see if it lives up to that.

NEWS OF THE WORLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) is no longer a kid. He creaks a little in the saddle these days, maybe limps a bit. We see him pull a shirt over some hideous war-wound scars. It’s 1870, Wichita Falls, Texas. Coins clink in his tin can as people gather and he rustles up his newspapers from far-off exotic lands like Pennsylvania and such. He reads stories from the papers with the verve of a bullshit artist, which he’s not, because the stories are journalistic and he’s played by Tom Hanks and his arrow-straight persona.

The next morn, he’s clopping his horse to the next town when he comes across a busted-up wagon and a little ways away, a Black man hanging dead in a tree and beyond that, a girl, a white girl, with blond hair and blue eyes, but wearing Indian suede and speaking Kiowan. Union soldiers arrive to side-eye the former Confederate captain, so, aha, maybe this Tom Hanks character isn’t a portrait of squeaky-clean virtue, although he looked sad about the lynched man, and later he’ll look sad about some butchered buffalo and some men who are still infatuated with slavery, and there’s a bit where he says he did what he had to do and the look in his eye tells us he probably knows he was on the wrong side of things. That’s a Tom Hanks performance for you.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. The girl is Johanna (Helena Zengel), and she acts more than a little feral, eating stew without a spoon, her throat emitting a scratchy growl. Watch what happens when someone tries to get her in a proper dress. Her parents are dead. The Indians who raised her, also dead. She has some folks a few weeks’ travel yonder, and Capt. Kidd is stuck with her and a 10-gallon hatful of reluctance. Maybe he sees it as a bit of repentance, protecting her from predatory scum, dispassionate government officials and the harsh elements as he gets her back to where she “belongs.” As the previous sentence states, it’s an arduous journey, but what do you think is going to happen in a Tom Hanks movie? It’s not like Tom Hanks will die trying to save a little girl. I mean, come on.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Dances with Wolves or Unforgiven mixed with one of the more square Hanks vehicles like Bridge of Spies or Greyhound, maybe a smidgen of True Grit (both of them) or a pinch of Lone Wolf and Cub thrown in there. Unfortunately, there’s not much of the hard-as-nails drama of Captain Phillips.

Performance Worth Watching: That one actor. You know his name — that guy. He’s in a bunch of movies. Funny fella. Earnest as hell. Right. Tom Hanks. And after playing Capt. Phillips, Capt. Sully, Capt. Miller, Capt. Krause and now Capt. Kidd, I think we’ve determined he’s altogether pretty decent at playing captains.

Memorable Dialogue: Capt. Kidd outlines his and Johanna’s character arcs with the following line: “I guess we both have demons to face down this road.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: News of the World churns up just enough subtextual queasiness — in its protagonist’s moral apprehension and insistence that his life is cursed, in its depiction of the Kiowa Indians as an ethereal, almost existential form of righteous justice — to elevate it above its parade of Western tropes. Johanna gestures and mutters the holistic, cyclical theories of nature and existence as a lesson to Capt. Kidd, and he conversely drafts a Psych 101 metaphor for healing in his insistence that they move forward and put the horrors of their pasts behind them. Neither are right and neither are wrong, but the movie doesn’t really go the holistic route, and keeps the Johanna/Kiowa narrative lines disappointingly murky, probably because it’s made by white people.

It’s also a story about the importance of stories, and before you sigh deep, keep in mind, that’s much better than movies about the importance of movies. Capt. Kidd maintains the oral tradition of the day, and News of the World therefore maybe stands on the soapbox espousing the need for modern folk to simplify and filter the information bombardment of the day. Although beyond that, it doesn’t assert much more than Hooray for Stories, Because They’re Good!

A tense standoff and shootout between Kidd and three cretinous evildoers is the film’s strongest sequence, an undeniably enjoyable Western-movie apparatus that serves to prove our hero’s mettle and stir the drama. The movie is very much a nod to classics of the genre, with its languid pace, lush wide-landscape cinematography and sawing-fiddles score. It’s also sincere as all git-out in its light deconstruction of Western bravado (which has been done before, never better than in Unforgiven). If you’re not on the Ford or Peckinpah wavelength, you’re not going to find much traction here, although frankly, Hanks is a draw to everything he does except the Da Vinci Code crud, so, yeah, business as usual.

Our Call: STREAM IT. News of the World doesn’t buck Western conventions enough to appeal beyond lovers of dusty horse-and-pistol sagas — especially if you’re eyeing that $19.99 VOD price tag. But you could do far worse than firing up a Tom Hanks movie to wile away your time. He’d probably thank you individually if he could.

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.

Where to stream News of the World