'Butcher's Crossing' review: Nicolas Cage becomes complete Brando in this neo-western

Nicolas Cage's direct-to-video days may be over - we've come a long way since 2019's treble hit 'Kill Chain', 'Primal', 'Grand Isle' - but the guy is just too much impatient and too curious to just sit by the phone and wait for someone to call him with a script as loud and/or well suited to him as "Mandy", "Pig" or "The unbearable weight of a huge talent".

While Cage's latest creative renaissance is hopefully just beginning, its current boom was always going to be marked by its fair share of forgetfully solid genre flicks. We're talking respectable programmers with compromised scripts, cool casts, and just enough credibility to walk into Redbox with your head held high. The kind of movie the director tried to make for over a decade before deciding it was better to drive a working Nicolas Cage than leave a rusting Rolls-Royce in the garage.

In other words, the low-rent but well-meaning "Butcher's Crossing" doesn't look like a hiccup in Cage's recent hot streak, but more like a visible part of the plan, and maybe even a preview of things to come.

Adapted from John Edward Williams' gritty, rangy 1960 novel of the same name - and largely reflecting the book's anti-Western efforts to restore a measure of harsh realism to a genre overrun with myth and cowboys - this an undercooked tale of a buffalo the hunt gone wrong doesn't have enough meat on its bones to capture the Emersonian flavor of its source material, or the vision to reflect that "Red Army" director Gabe Polsky is trying to wearing it on screen for more than ten years. What he does is a bald, burly Nicolas Cage who spouts maniacal ideas about the best way to shoot a bison and sports a thick beard that ironically makes him look like a John Travolta from the VOD era, no facial surgery required.

The story begins in 1874, when a fresh-faced Harvard boy named Will Andrews (the escape from Fred Hechinger's "The White Lotus") arrives in Kansas seeking a different kind of education . "I hope to find stronger purpose and more meaning in my life," the minister's son intones over the film's threadbare voiceover, "and broaden my understanding of the world beyond Boston."

Of course, there aren't a single Dunkin' Donuts in the border town where he lands - only a handful of desperate buffalo hunters, a beautiful sex worker he's too shy to sleep with, and a badass hide-trader (The Sound of Metal favorite Paul Raci) who has no time for a white New England boy with hands as soft as a baby's cheek. "Young people always think there's something to discover," he spits, as if each day brings with it a new kid who sees half the country as his personal Westworld.

This is a threadbare adventure without much time to spare, Will is barely in town five minutes before he finds himself at a bar table in front of an ambitious hunter who could use a stupid kid with $500 in pocket to finance his big score. The herds have been scattered by overhunting and it's getting harder and harder to kill in every sense of the word, but that's no problem for the madman Miller (Cage).

The hunter is eager to visit a secret valley in the Colorado Rockies where bison run as wide and deep as the sea, and he's more than happy to take Will and his money with him on the journey. Also joining their party: a ruthless skinner named ('The Knick' actor Jeremy Bobb) and a one-armed religious alcoholic named Charley (an almost unrecognizable Xander Berkeley). “Why fear God? Will asks the latter. "You will see", comes the answer.

And so they set off into an inhospitable wasteland, Hechinger fading further into the background with each step as Will became virtually a passive observer - as if the buffalo hunt was an elaborate ride he was paying for to watch from the front row. Sure, he did to some degree, but Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy's screenplay freezes the character to the point that it can be easy to forget he's even there. p>

If there is anything for Will to "discover" in the Open West, the discovery lies entirely within himself, and yet the abject lack of self this film provides him with makes it difficult for either the other of the story to sink deeper than its literal circumstance; the flat digital cinematography and some glaring artificial green screens further dampen any invitation to poetry. At least the bison looks real, thanks in large part to Polsky's collaboration with Blackfoot Nation animal protectors.

"Butcher's Crossing" could not have existed...