GUNSLINGERS (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Gunslingers, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 10, 2025

A small town stands like the last remnant of the Old West in Kentucky in Gunslingers. It's a place called Redemption, and it's home to outlaws of all stripes but no specifics, who have escaped the law and bounty hunters and are looking for a fresh start. If any outsider connected the faces on the wanted posters attached to the graves of the nearby cemetery and those of the residents of this town, the entire scheme would collapse, of course, but who needs such logic when there are shootouts to be had, old grudges to come to the fore, and more shootouts to distract us from how shallow this Western is?

Writer/director Brian Skiba doesn't have much of a story to tell here, or more to the point, he doesn't have one to tell that takes advantage of his premise. In a town filled with reformed outlaws, what kind of big personalities and bigger questions about justice, a person's past defining who that person is, and, yes, redemption could we see at play? Sure, Skiba's screenplay pretty much eliminates any kind of philosophical musings as soon as it becomes clear that a posse is out to capture at least one denizen of Redemption, but that doesn't eliminate the possibility that these characters could still be interesting or fun, even on a broad level.

One actor understands that potential here, but since it's Nicolas Cage and no one else in the movie seems brave or uninhibited enough to try to get within 50 paces of his over-the-top performance, he stands out in an unfortunate way. His character is Ben, a man who put down his pistols years ago and took up the Bible instead. Cage plays him with a raspy whisper, plenty of physical tics (At times, it seems as if the character can hear the rock-infused score and is swaying along to it), and cross-tinted glasses. By the time the climax arrives, the actor almost seems to be channeling, of all people, James Brown or, at least, some parody version of a character that has already come across as a joke.

This isn't pick on Cage, who is doing something with his otherwise bland character. It is, however, to point out that every other character in the movie is just as dull but is made even more boring by comparison to Cage's. It's surely unwise to fill a movie entirely with performances akin to the one Cage gives here and expect us to take it seriously. There's also, though, a miscalculation in hinting at a more eccentric approach to this type of character and denying us it otherwise.

That includes our hero Thomas Keller (Stephen Dorff), who kills a Rockefeller—yes, of the New York Rockefellers, as an on-screen title informs us—and arrives in Redemption four years later after evading the largest bounty ever put on a criminal. After turning over his six-shooters and being baptized, Thomas' death is faked by the town's head Jericho (Costas Mandylor), and he'll welcomed into the fold after word of his "hanging" reaches civilization and the bounty is lifted.

A posse led by Thomas' brother Robert (Jeremy Kent Jackson), whom Thomas left for dead after his brother caught fire while robbing that Rockefeller, arrives in Redemption, looking to capture Thomas alive for the sizeable reward. They dig up his grave, find only a coyote's head in the coffin, and make their determination to get their man known by shooting up the local saloon several times over the course of the story.

That's the basic formula of the screenplay: Robert and his gang warn the townsfolk, start shooting when their warnings aren't taken seriously, warn them again, begin with the shooting after more defiance from the locals, etc. The locals don't have much going on by way of personality, by the way, except that Doc (Randall Batinkoff) is indeed a doctor, Levi (Cooper Barnes) likes to play with a knife, and Lin (Tzi Ma) is of Chinese heritage. That's genuinely the extent of any characterization for these outlaws, so there's very little reason to care about their fates as digital bullet strikes hit the walls around them until the script needs to raise the stakes by allowing one or two of them to be shot.

Also in the mix is Val (Heather Graham), who has escaped her husband Robert and come looking for Thomas on her own, and her daughter, and you're probably the movie's entire run time ahead of the not-so-surprising revelation to be had there. Gunslingers is that predictable and uninspired throughout, with everyone behind and, save for Cage, in front of the camera going through the motions of an entirely pedestrian Western.

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