For those who yearn for horse- and gun-happy revenge stories spiced by big dumb period-specific mustaches, Trail of Vengeance (now streaming on Hulu) might give you your Western fix – if you’re not too picky, that is. This low-budget programmer stars Rumer Willis as a widow on the [INSERT TITLE OF MOVIE HERE] who can dead-eye tin cans and ne’er-do-wells with a rifle, just like director/co-writer Johnny Remo bullseyes cliches. In the struggle to find something notable about the movie, I realized it co-stars serial That Guy grindhouse actor Jeff Fahey, who’s been in so many A-, B- and Z-grade Westerns (most recently Horizon: Chapter 1 and dating back to 1985’s Silverado), he probably just keeps his facial hair like that all the time. Whether he elevates this one to something watchable, though? I’m not so sure about that.
The Gist: Get ready to do something excruciatingly thrilling: READING SOME TEXT! A title card tells us Trail of Vengeance is “based on historical figures and events” having to do with the Pinkertons, a secret military service that Abraham Lincoln organized to spy on the Confederacy. It’s 1875. The Civil War is over, and Suhh-thuhhn-drawwwlllling scumbucket and former Confederate colonel Davis (Fahey) sits behind his desk in a big house on a Kentucky plantation, running for the Senate, and a coverup is in order. He’s hired a scarfaced jagoff named Frank (Eric Nelsen), who’s a bad man, and his rapist pal Zeke (James Landry Hebert), also a bad man, to kill ex-Pinkerton operatives who witnessed brutal massacres that Davis ordered during the war. This hombre Davis? Yep. He’s a bad man. Notably, this scenario functions under 19th-century assumptions that war crimes might disqualify one for public office, unlike now, when it would most likely earn one even more votes rimshot.
ELSEWHERE. Katherine (Willis) and her hubs Caleb (Jeremy Sumpter) are living the American Dream: A little house, a slab of land full of dirt for diggin’, and a growing family. She’s pregnant, and they’re thrilled. One fateful day, Caleb busts his diggin’ shovel – That was my daddy’s shovel Katherine laments and we’re all like babe it’s just a shovel, but her daddy was a good man, and therefore that must’ve been a good shovel. Alas, Caleb needs a new shovel so he ventures forth to the general store to get one, and while he’s there he picks up an imported music box to give Katherine in celebration of her pregnancy.
Upon returning to the homestead, he finds three sleazebagganos pointing guns at his wife. Yes, two of them are Frank and Zeke, and we’ll just call the third one Mr. Expendable because he ends up dead in the ensuing kerfuffle. Unfortunately, so does Caleb. He was one of the Pinkertons, which is news to Katherine. He had a whole other life he never told her about. He was a good man. And now he’s gone. And so are Frank and Zeke, the former showing mercy on a woman with child. This doesn’t make Frank a good man. He’s still a bad man. As for Zeke, he’s always a bad man. He was about to have his way with Katherine until Frank stopped him. Bad men sometimes do good things like that.
But! This was a bad move. Frank and Zeke apparently don’t realize they’re in a movie called Trail of Vengeance, or were privy to the scene featuring Katherine’s target practice with a lever-action rifle. She steels herself, buries her husband, puts on some pants and a pistol and giddyups on after those rootin’-tootin’ sunsabitches. She doesn’t run off half-cocked and angry and aimless, though. She found a letter from Caleb stating, in the event of his passing, she should find his old Pinkerton pal Scobell (Gbenga Akinnagbe), and he’d “help her out.” Of course, Caleb’s intent wasn’t to have her put bullets into the major organs of morally compromised cowpokes to avenge his death, and Scobell’s reluctant to get involved in more violent bullcrap. This makes him what kind of man? Right. A good man. But she’s passionate, and persuasive, and pregnant. You just can’t say no to that.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt is a far deeper and more original Western about a woman left on her own in a dangerous world.
Performance Worth Watching: Akinnagbe keeps his performance low-key, and ends up being the grounding force for a movie where the cast tends to go big in order to bolster the lackluster screenplay.
Memorable Dialogue: A hotel concierge functions to remind us that gals just didn’t wear pants in that era: “Ain’t seen a woman dressed like that!”
Sex and Skin: A brief threat of sexual violence.
Our Take: Anyone fishing for thematic motifs in Trail of Vengeance, rest assured, Remo and Daniel Backman’s script is obsessed with divvying up the world into good men and bad men. Declarations of goodness and badness of men abound to the point where the drinking game, should it be declared, might put you in a coffin. There are good men, and they do good things, and that’s good. And there are bad men, and they do bad things, and that’s bad. There’s your message. I’d like to add that good men sometimes do bad things, like killing bad men, because good men killing bad men can be for the greater good. The movie isn’t really interested in such nuance, or exploring the idea of vengeance as an ethical dead end. But it is gratingly repetitive.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Good men, OK, bad men, sure – but what about women? Well, the protagonist is a woman and good golly would you get a load of her pants and her pistol? Katherine may be carrying an unborn child, but she essentially acts like a man, and the movie half-assedly expects that to be a rallying point for her radical 19th-century feminism. She can kill a mofo just like any gun-bro with a penis in his dungarees! Willis, bless her, bears down and cashes a paycheck; this first-draft slop is hopeless no matter who’s dutifully reading the lines.
Such stripped-down simplicity applies to the filmmaking, too – Remo cuts close to the bone because the budget won’t allow otherwise. The movie wastes no time getting to its grandiose, cornball thriller-drama, then fills time between confrontations with tedious circular dialogue and the main characters’ half-assed sob-backstories. You’ll preemptively step on the cliches in the dialogue, and predict the plot’s mushbrained twists several beats early, all the way to the frustrating, logic-deprived climax, which of course is a shootout, and a poorly staged one to boot. Visually, the locations look recycled, as if the filmmakers just set up shots in the same places at different angles, because who can tell? In the parlance of the script, this is not a good movie. This is a bad movie.
Our Call: This Western goes south in a hurry – and stays there. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.