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“Butcher’s Crossing” - 2.5/4
This is an adaptation of a novel listed alongside “Blood Meridian” as Western genre classics, and if it is anything to go by, “Blood Meridian” must excel in the areas of storytelling where your imagination does the hard work for you. Bleak but beautiful, fancy but old-hat cinematography combines with bleak, tiring and deeply insincere dialogue to create a vast expanse of wasted opportunity for actors to act. In fact there is only one entirely solid performance, it is not Nicolas Cage, and that character arc is actually sensible up to a point… but it’s culmination is disgracefully reimagined for the screen in a way that almost ruins the character build. I had to look the novel up to make sure it was a deliberate change and not an actual adaptation because it was so incredibly deflating when it happened on screen.
After that all bets are off and Nic Cage goes all Nic Cage again. Thankfully it is a short ride to the credits by then.
This could have been an intelligent wee film from the plot itself, but the way it is handled is a great shame. It may just have taken itself too seriously, but I defy any viewer to hear some of the extraneous dialogue and not want to punch the TV.
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