Gunslingers (2025) is an uncannily on-point, accidental self-allegory. The movie is set in Redemption, which would be your standard frontier town with a wide Main Street, a saloon, and a room over the saloon occupied by a sexy hooker were it not that it was founded and it’s mostly populated by wanted criminals who have faked their deaths with one another’s help to escape persecution — a rather unlikely, quite possibly unheard-of Town with a Dark Secret/Close-Knit Community hybrid.
The film stars Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham (whose character rents a room over the saloon and is called a “whore” once, although I’m pretty sure it’s figuratively), and Nicholas Cage wearing a bowler hat and cross-shaped dark glasses that he never takes off, and speaking like a Scratchy-Voiced Senior. I suspect these aren’t performance quirks so much as a legitimate attempt to lie low.
In this film, their characters come to Redemption to become unwanted. In real life, these actors are drawn to obscure, anonymous pictures like Gunslingers because they have become unwanted. Redemption’s graveyard is filled with empty coffins, the void within representing what these individuals’ careers have come to. I’m a child of the 90s. I know that 30 years ago, this would have been a dream cast. It pains me to write these words as much as it would have pained the filmmakers had they realized the extent to which they were blurring the line between fact and fiction.
There is, mind you, intentional symbolism in the script. The problem is that the characters live a purely symbolic life wherein the symbol and that which it symbolizes are one and the same. For example, the unspoken notion that living in a place called Redemption automatically redeems you. We’re expected to root for a townful of rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, vipers, con men, bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, train robbers, bank robbers, and shit-kickers whom we never see doing anything to make amends for their past crimes (which we never see them commit, making their alleged transformation even less credible) but in fact go to extreme lengths to avoid getting their just deserts. If these people had truly repented, they would turn themselves in or otherwise make some sort of meaningful sacrifice to earn their absolution. Instead, they remain a bunch of selfish, cowardly hypocrites.
At the same time, the movie is predicated on the flimsy concept that there is honor among thieves. Redemption is a veritable Smurf village when logic suggests it should be closer to Cop Land’s Garrison. Moreover, its inhabitants are all simpatico and solidary when realistically they would be looking over their shoulder constantly and sleeping with one eye open. By sparing them their comeuppance, the screenplay is as big a failure in redeeming its characters as it is in vindicating its actors.
Incidentally, Gunslingers co-stars Cooper Barnes, who played the indestructible Captain Man in Nickelodeon’s Henry Danger and its spinoff/sequel Danger Force. I don’t know what the alternative was, but this is a step down for him. You can’t hope to elevate your profile with everybody else flying this low under the radar. Barnes does have a nice, hammy little scene that leads me to suspect something of the leads might have rubbed off on him. That notwithstanding, he must have been as disappointed as Val Kilmer when he finally got a chance to act opposite Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau. To add insult to injury, Barnes is accustomed to Nickelodeon’s higher production values. The “action” in Gunslingers is several notches below those Old West ghost town tourist trap live gunfight shows.
Computer-generated imagery (whether it be the expensive, cheap-looking kind or just cheap) almost always feels forced — out of place and time. The farther back in the past you set a story, the more intrusive, extraneous, and anachronistic CGI becomes. And in a western — which ought to be the grittiest, grimiest, dustiest, sweatiest, smelliest, wildest of genres — it is inadmissibly unnatural and inorganic.
On the plus side (for the filmmakers, that is), when bullets, bullet wounds, blood, fire, and rain have all been digitally and clumsily added in post-production, it discourages the viewer from asking such pertinent questions as, how is it that so many fugitives from justice being ostensibly captured and executed in the same town without anyone bothering to collect the rewards doesn’t arise the slightest suspicion from the state and federal governments? Maybe Redemption is an actual ghost town and everyone in it is as dead as their career prospects.
