Though hardly original, the idea of a town populated entirely with bad men trying to go good is at least a fun one. But writer-director Brian Skiba (whose extensive credits include a bevy of similar streaming-fillers as well as a bunch of Lifetime Originals and Christmas movies) doesn’t end up doing much with the premise. Instead, the plot goes in a less interesting direction, beginning with the arrival of Thomas’ sister-in-law, Val (Heather Graham), who rides into town with a bullet wound in her thigh and her young daughter in tow. It isn’t long before Thomas’ evil, one-eyed brother Robert (Jeremy Kent Jackson) arrives with his posse of goons, intent on taking Val and Thomas back with him.
However, no one who’s likely to check out Gunslingers is going to be interested in the plot. Rather, the main appeal here is the cult factor of Nicolas Cage, who gets prominent billing for his supporting turn as Ben, an autistic, born-again ex-gunman who wears tinted cross-shaped glasses and speaks in a bizarre, croaky voice that is somewhere between RFK Jr. and a parched impression of Tom Waits’ rasp. It is, in fact, a truly weird performance that only someone like Cage would invest in an otherwise generically written role. But it’s not as though there’s a shortage of gonzo Cage performances out there—many of which can be found in far better (or at least more entertaining) films.
The larger part of Gunslingers consists of an interminable showdown, with the citizens of Redemption facing off against Robert and his hired guns on opposite sides of a flat, sketchy-looking frontier-town street that appears to be somewhere in the middle of a forest. (Some quick Googling reveals that the movie was actually shot at a shuttered Old West-themed tourist trap in Kentucky, which, if old TripAdvisor reviews are to be believed, really started to go downhill after they got rid of the live gunfights.) Stylistically, it’s as unremarkable as its title, with flavorless dialogue, a drab color palette, and repetitive shootouts in which characters fall over barrels and through windows amidst a cheaply composited mist of digital gunfire and blood.
Which is to say that none of it comes within spitting distance of the Western programmers of yore, which were cranked out by the hundreds in the 1940s and ‘50s by the studios of Hollywood’s notorious Poverty Row. Not all of those films had artistic value—and when they did, it was usually the result of some artistic pretension or ambition on the part of a director who was either at the beginning of their career or at rock bottom. But they could at least be relied on for an economy of story and style, and the good sense to clock in at somewhere around an hour. Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.
Director: Brian Skiba
Writer: Brian Skiba
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham, Nicolas Cage
Release Date: April 11, 2025
