Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Old Way’ on VOD, a Nicolas Cage Western That Just Shoots Blanks

The Old Way (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime) is the first-ever trad Western for Nicolas Cage, who plays a mean-as-hell rootin’-tootin’ cold-blooded damn hell ass killer who’s trying to reform hisself. The good: Cage as a badass morally fraught cowboy! The bad: Cage is back to doing cheapo junk! One might’ve thought that, between his stunning shoulda-been-an-Oscar-nominee performance in Pig, and splashy meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage had officially emerged from the B-movie hell (Willy’s Wonderland, Primal, The Runner, Arsenal, etc. etc. etc.) of his past decade or so of work. But alas, this clop-clopper through the Old West is yet another lo-budge foray for the guy – the same guy who can make a collection of weary cliches interesting with a single bananas line reading. So maybe The Old Way ain’t so bad? Let’s find out.

THE OLD WAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jesus, the handlebar mustache on Cage. If he wasn’t playing the Man You Don’t F— With – Christian name: Colton Briggs – you might expect the nearest Harley-riding toughguy to wrestle it off his face and install it on his hog. As it stands, Colton leans against a pole, totally chill about the fact that he’s about to watch a man be hanged by the neck until he’s dead. He’s seen it all, Colton. As expected, bullets start to fly – and Colton still doesn’t flinch. The mustache doesn’t even twitch a little bit. When the smoke clears, the executee remains unexecuted, much to the relief of the guy’s son. Except Colton puts a bullet in the guy. After all that. The little boy can only watch in horror. Colton gets his dough and off he goes.

TWENTY YEARS LATER. The mustache is gone. And so is the Colton who didn’t give a damn if other people lived or died. He has a simple life now, with a wife, Ruth (Kerry Knuppe), and a young daughter, Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). He runs a general store in Wyoming. Colton seems happy, I guess; he doesn’t smile much. One day he walks little Brooke to school except it’s closed due to the teacher being poorly, so she goes with him to work. A grubby guy comes into the store and talks Colton’s ear off about flour and puts his grubby hands in the jelly bean jar, so Brooke spends the day washing the jelly beans, one by one. Cute little shit, ain’t she? But while they’re gone, some bad men show up at the house. How bad? Real bad. That little boy from the first paragraph? He’s an adult now, James McAllister (Noah Le Gros). And next thing you know, Colton is digging a grave.

While Colton shovels, Marshal Jarret (Justified’s Nick Searcy!) sits on the porch with Brooke. Strange – she seems weirdly calm. Not a single tear. A chip off the old block, it seems. Colton isn’t a man with no name, but he’s The Man Who Don’t Cry, and he delivers a whole speech about how even as a boy his eyeballs never leaked the clear salty fluid that often accompanies grief. And what follows is a revenge story that might just be an angry man making his little girl an accessory to all sorts of amoral behavior. We haven’t seen many movies featuring father-daughter sociopaths, I guess.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The reformed-cutthroat-tempted-back-to-his-old-ways plot is right out of Unforgiven; the little girl/grizzled cowboy dynamic is lifted from True Grit.

Performance Worth Watching: The mini CAGENAISSANCE of the last couple years meanders off the path for a minute – our star doesn’t put in much hard work here and stays in line with an overall unambitious production – but hopefully only until he plays Dracula in Renfield later this year.

Memorable Dialogue: Colton delivers an inevitable existential speech or three here, the best of them being: “Nothin’ belongs to the dead… once they’ve been put in the ground, they have all they need. They’re not so special. I like the dead.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Director Brett Donowho and writer Carl W. Lucas have Nicolas Cage at their disposal, a dearth of old-school Westerns to compete with, dependable weirdo Clint Howard playing a grizzled old coot and a potentially compelling father-daughter dynamic to play with – and end up leaving a lot of points on the field. We can’t expect Cage to give a mad-testicles gonzoid loonberry performance in every movie, lest his appeal quickly dwindle (gotta strategically deploy the nukes, you know), but here, he’s an Olympic medalist swimmer left to splash around in a subtextual mud puddle. You can never really run away from your past. The sins of a reformed life always return to bite you in the ass. And up above the majestic landscape, the vultures circle – over this weary, DOA plot, which drives a generally unremarkably watchable revenge movie.

Donowho seems averse to the comic potential of weirdos like Cage and Howard, seemingly tamping down any creative impulses they might’ve had. And Armstrong – who showed some potential in the otherwise drecky 2022 Firestarter remake – shows glimpses of an internal battle between her father’s dark nature and her mother’s nurturing spirit, but this element of her character is all but shrugged at, underdeveloped and left to wither on the vine. The struggle between redemption and the survival-of-the-fittest harshness of the Old West are common themes of many Westerns, and even if those horse paths are well-trod, they can still be thoughtful and inspired with a well-honed script and a classicist reverence for harsh, beautiful landscapes. The Old Way kind of tries to do it the old way, but its heart doesn’t seem to be in it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Old Way’s six-shooter is just firing blanks.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.