This could have been an incredibly cool gothic western, but it was botched at every opportunity. I mean, how does a script like this make it to production without a massive final rewrite? You can literally watch every single scene and think of a dozen better ways to stage it, block it, act it and direct it. Cage just scratches the surface of his potential once again and mails it in without seeming to ever question who his character is supposed to be. The end is a goddamned mess, as if nobody knew how to end this debacle or resolve any of the character arcs, so they just said "ahh, screw it." Last of all, Cage's embracing of the bald reality we knew to be true was blown by leaving in a shot that blatantly featured his hair transplant scars. It was like seeing the boom in the shot in a period piece - I no longer believed I was in the old west on a doomed buffalo hunt. I was watching a total wreck of a film.
Review of Butcher's Crossing
