Mark Reviews Movies: THE HARDER THE FALL (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2021

The story of The Harder They Fall is almost entirely fiction, formed from about a century and a half of legends of the Old West and more than a century's worth of cinematic Westerns. The fiction part is announced immediately in co-writer/director Jeymes Samuel's film. The rest of it we can pretty much gather as soon as this tale starts, with a young boy witnessing the murders of his parents, at the end of the barrels of a ruthless outlaw's revolvers, and the boy, grown up to become an outlaw himself, hunting down the gang that killed his family.

The text prologue of Samuel and co-writer Boaz Yakin's screenplay makes a second point, punctuated in such a way that we don't miss it: "These. People. Existed." It's true from a historical perspective, for sure. The boy who grows up to become the gun-toting avenger is Nat Love, a freed slave who became a fairly famous cowboy. The criminals who murder the parents are the Rufus Buck Gang—in reality, made up of Black and Native American members, who robbed and killed in areas of what would become Arkansas and Oklahoma, shortly before the calendar turned to the 20th century.

It's unlikely that the real Love, whose parents almost certainly weren't murdered, and the actual Buck Gang would ever have crossed paths. Surely, though, the gang would have been known to Bass Reeves, the famous lawman who was the first Black member of the U.S. Marshal service. Reeves features in this tale, too, as do many other figures whose stories and legends as heroes and outlaws have been overshadowed or mostly ignored in the history books and movies. Here, with a lot of dramatic license and plenty of flourish, they get their due—as heroes, as villains, as characters existing within those shades of moral gray in between.

Samuel, obviously, isn't simply telling us these people existed as a matter of historical fact. The three-word statement is more potent and pointed than that: These people existed, and their stories deserve to, can, and will be told, just as every other cowboy or outlaw or lawman of Old West legend has been told before them. They're Black, and they're legends.

The film's own existence, as a mostly familiar but often rousing Western, serves as proof of that declaration. Here, we do meet Nat (Jonathan Majors), who arrives in some small town in the yet-to-be-officially-settled territories, looking for revenge.

The last surviving member of the murderous posse, aside from its currently incarcerated leader, is in hiding as a preacher, and after a tense and slickly worded verbal standoff, Nat unloads his pistol into the villain before his body even hits the floor. There's a succinctly clever exchange with the town's actual preacher. With Nat explaining that the holy man can get $5,000 for turning in the outlaw's body, the avenger answers why he can't do it himself: "I'm worth 10." In its best moments, the dialogue here possesses an appropriately anachronistic music to it (just like the soundtrack, by the way).

The plot involves Nat's own gang—including quick-draw master Jim Beckworth (RJ Cyler) and expert marksman Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi)—robbing some bank robbers during their getaway. The money, as it turns out, was meant to be split with the man who actually murdered Nat's parents.

Yes, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), who's first introduced with no small amount of intimidation by way of his gold-plated pistols in the prologue, is about to become a free man. He's broken out of a steel box aboard a train by his newer gang, including the ruthlessly pragmatic Trudy Smith (Regina King) and the fastest draw in the West—although rumors are he has a habit of shooting people in the back—Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield). All of them have been pardoned in a corrupt exchange, so Nat, with his gang and saloon proprietor/love interest Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz) and Marshal Reeves (Delroy Lindo), set out to put an end to Rufus' ways and life.

Plot-wise, all of this fairly or blatantly familiar. That simultaneously hardly matters and is a good portion of the filmmakers' point.

The routine story elements—the revenge angle, the prison break, a bank robbery in a white (demographically and, on account of the fallen snow on the ground and the marble-colored paint on the buildings, literally) town, an extended and multi-leveled action setpiece for a climax—are bolstered by Samuel's strong sense of visual style. The filmmaker not-so-subtly pays homage to famous clichés of the genre (e.g., tight close-ups of eyes), while also offering plenty of dynamic camera movements (One shot travels from inside a building, down the length of a town's main street, and to the face of our hero) and editing rhythms (The train break-out, as Rufus' gang talks and fights and shoots their way to their boss, is a notable standout in this regard).

The performances are generally and equally sturdy. Majors is a fine, conflicted hero, and Beetz, wielding a shotgun like a walking stick, is a tough and unwavering presence, even when Mary falls into—but mostly subverts—the role of the damsel in distress. Elba serves as a frighteningly righteous heavy—so certain of his rightness, in saving the town he runs from outside influence, that he'll burn everything to ground to protect what it represents.

Among the many supporting players, a few stand out. Danielle Deadwyler portrays Cuffee, Mary's bouncer and confidant, who prefers pants to a skirt. King is a fearsome right hand to Rufus and, by way of her history of abuse and neglect, a wounded inflictor of pain, and Stanfield plays the infamous gunfighter as weary soul, tired of either his reputation or the underhanded means he has employed to secure it.

The Harder They Fall is a clever and polished piece of myth-making. If much of it feels like a typical Western, that is, in a way, to the film's benefit. These characters are, after all, claiming a history and a sense of fable that have always belonged to them.

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