LAWS OF MAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Laws of Man, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 9, 2025

The setting of Laws of Man is the desert of Nevada in 1963, but this story feels almost lost in time. Its characters certainly seem that way in multiple ways. They're two U.S. marshals, traveling the West on a pair of assignments, with both involving criminals who have terrified the region. While they're dressed in suits and speak of procedure as if they're lawmen from some 1930s G-men tale, Frank Fenton (Jacob Keohane) and Tommy Morton (Jackson Rathbone) almost have the air of bounty hunters or cowboys from a story of the previous century.

Maybe there's something to this in writer/director Phil Blattenberger's movie, which is stranger than the basic premise might make it sound. The two men may be different in personality, with the elder Frank sticking to the rules and the younger Tommy seemingly keen on breaking them, but they have a lot in common, too.

They're both military veterans, with Frank fighting in Europe during World War II and Tommy flying planes in Korea, and each one has a strong sense of right and wrong—good and evil. According to both, war made it easier for them to see the lines, but with the changing times and the Cold War underway, those lines have become a bit blurrier for them.

Again, the idea behind all of this has some promise, which Blattenberger clearly knows but doesn't quite communicate well in a story that opens as formula, begins to lose focus amidst some philosophical undertones and eccentric detours, and only starts to really embrace how odd it could be in the third act. At that point, the story expands in scope to such an over-the-top degree that one can't help but wonder where the filmmaker's nerve has been until then.

For the most part, however, the plot basically pits Frank and Tommy against a devious villain. He's Benjamin Bonney (Dermot Mulroney, a bit too hammy for the character to feel like a genuine threat), a local rancher whom everyone in the area knows as an ambitious, cutthroat kind of man. After putting an end to a gang of violent thugs (Frank wants to bring them in to face justice, but Tommy's too trigger-happy for that to happen), the lawmen decide to serve an arrest warrant issued for Benjamin. He doesn't take too kindly to the unannounced intrusion, especially since the pair make a joke about showing up at his ranch and proceed to shoot up the place.

On paper, this is all pretty straightforward. Benjamin has a long history—only officially suspected by the local Sheriff (played by Graham Greene)—of invading others' property, burning down any structures on it, and killing anyone who happens to be there at the time. He's a bad guy in the way of some old Western tale—a land-nabber, a man of unofficial power and influence, a murderer of men, women, children, and horses. The local cops are stymied, and the federal police have little interest in Benjamin. That leaves our men, those heroes out of time, to stop him—ideally by the book but, as the villain's schemes and aims toward the marshals escalate, outside of the law, if necessary.

It's tough, then, to explain when, where, how, and why things go sideways in Blattenberger's screenplay. The story is simple, which is part of the issue, since the movie only broadly provides outlines for the plot and characters. We get, for example, that Tommy is the more reckless of the marshals, shooting before speaking or even thinking and quickly taking in a local woman (played by Ashley Gallegos) at the motel where the two lawmen are staying while dealing with Benjamin. We also understand that Frank is haunted by his actions during the war, as flashbacks gradually build toward a single deed that he thought was necessary to save American soldiers' lives but had an entirely different outcome.

That's about the end of their characterization, though, leaving them to go through the motions of going after Benjamin, uncovering a conspiracy of local authorities protecting the outlaw for some reason, and waiting around for a good, legal reason to take their hunt further. The downtime has Frank confronting his past and getting some preacherly advice from Rev. Whittaker (Harvey Keitel), a man who comes across as out of time and place, given his bizarre style of evangelism that includes psychedelic drugs.

Which brings us to the third act, or perhaps, it doesn't. Without saying too much, the finale certainly feels like some kind of paranoid fantasy, raising the stakes of a local conspiracy to a much, much bigger one, while including the hints of politics and Cold War-era worries that have been scattered throughout the surprisingly lethargic story. Whether or not we're supposed to take the last act of Laws of Man as the real deal, though, almost becomes irrelevant. Blattenberger takes it seriously and brings some sense of consequence to what happens, and again, we have to wonder where this approach has been for the rest of the movie.

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