Over 100 films into a career that’s most recently seen him play a grief-stricken truffle hunter (Pig) and not one, but two meta versions of himself (The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent), it’s genuinely shocking that The Old Way is Nicolas Cage’s first out-and-out Western. (Butcher's Crossing, another Cage Western which premiered at Toronto last year, is yet to be released.) Unfortunately, that’s about the only surprising element of Brett Donowho’s film, a by-numbers revenger set in the dying days of the Old West that unfavourably recalls Cage’s DTV era.
A pre-title prologue introduces us to Cage’s bounty hunter, Colton Briggs, whose prodigious skills with a six-shooter are shown off as he turns a town square hanging into an impromptu bloodbath. With his Yosemite Sam ‘tache and a Wayne-worthy stare — which ends up fixed on the son of one of the men he’s just dispatched in a moment of foreshadowing that’s about as subtle as anything gets here — Cage convinces as a cold-blooded killer.
A blandly shot, cheap-looking pastiche of a hundred better Westerns.
When we rejoin him twenty years later, Colton's hung up his holster and lost the facial shrubbery, and is now living out a prairie dream with his soon-to-be-fridged wife Ruth (Kerry Knuppe) and their daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). But then James McAllister (an exuberant if scattershot Noah Le Gros) and a brainless band of ruffians arrive to avenge his father, and things swiftly take a turn for the True Grit from there.
The most frustrating thing about The Old Way isn’t so much that it’s a blandly shot, cheap-looking pastiche of a hundred better Westerns with scant stylistic ambition or narrative depth: at least bland is forgettable. No, what really rankles is that Donowho and screenwriter Carl W. Lucas actually have an ace up their sleeve — two, in fact — that they continually fail to play, or at least play effectively.
Whether driven by screenplay, direction, or performance, Colton and Brooke exhibit clear signs of neurodivergence. Early on, we see Brooke meticulously sorting beans; later, she perfectly mimics a rant she heard days ago about apples without faltering. In a standout fireside scene which sees Armstrong and Cage on top form, Colton and Brooke bond over their shared emotional incapacities. It could have been fascinating to explore how these characters navigate and process a changing world at a time where autism wasn’t even a word. Instead, everything proceeds as predicted, right up to an eye-rolling “Let’s do this the old way!” at the end. Based on the preceding 90 minutes, maybe let’s not, actually.