The clichés come early and in great abundance in Brett Donowho’s The Old Way. This morose western centers around your prototypical aged gunslinger—that is, one who’s lived long enough to be plugned into self-reflection over his life of violence. But, of course, a man like Colton Briggs (Nicolas Cage) can never really exorcise the ghosts of his past.
In short order, James McCallister (Noah LeGros), the son of one of Colton’s long-ago victims, rides up on our protagonist’s homestead hungry for revenge. Colton is out, prompting James to take out his bloodlust on the man’s wife, Ruth (Kerry Knuppe), who appears on screen just long enough to tell the outlaw and his gang that they’re about to make the last mistake of their lives.
The only thing that separates The Old Way from so many revenge pictures that have come before it is that Colton is saddled with his young daughter, Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), on his vengeance quest. Naturally, this prepubescent child ultimately proves more precocious and resourceful than expected, a wrinkle that more or less exists to absolve the filmmakers of having to acknowledge the insanity of a 12-year-old being dragged into one gunfight after another.
Throughout, the film homes in on Brooke’s general lack of emotional response, even to her mother’s death, which it heavily codes as evidence of her being on the autism spectrum. Soon, Colton intimates that he may also be autistic when he talks about his own lifelong struggles to relate to others. In the film’s best scene, Colton opens up about his own lifelong difficulties with processing emotions, and how his general numbness was shaken by his wife.
This scene is unexpectedly tender, and not unwelcome in the moment, though in retrospect it comes to feel like a means on the part of Carl W. Lucas’s script of absolving Colton of his past sins instead of contextualizing them. The Old Way’s second half is a paint-by-numbers affair tracing the inevitable showdown between two hard men that’s all the more unfortunate for wasting Cage’s understated, weary performance during the early stretch of the film.
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