Wyatt Earp. Seth Bullock. Pat Garrett. Bat Masterson. Judge Roy Bean. The Wild West lawmen we've all heard of and seen onscreen any number of times. What do they all have in common? Have a guess. What about Bass Reeves? Lawman extraordinaire. The man who took down 3,000 dangerous criminals as a U.S. Marshall down Arkansas and Oklahoma way. His name isn't as well known. Why? Because he was Black of course. One of the Western genre's biggest failings was the whitewashing of American history and while things are improving there's a long way to go yet. The Hard They Fall is another stepping stone and Bass Reeves is along for the journey alongside Nat Love, Rufus Buck, Stagecoach Mary and Cherokee Bill, four more real life names that never got the screentime they deserved.
Young Nat Love is having a roast chicken dinner when his world comes crashing down around his ears. Years later he's a grown man (Jonathan Majors), a bandit and a revenge seeker. His gang have just robbed money belonging to a killer and want to rest up for a while and enjoy their spoils. The killer is Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), a bandit with a reputation as wide as a state. He's also the man who ruined Nat Love's life and he's about to do so again when his partners Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trudy Smith (Regina King) release him from jail. The Buck gang quickly takes over the town of Redwood and when Nat finds out he's free he starts to itch for some justice. Along with his lady Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), quickdraw supremo Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler) and Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo), the man who put Buck away, they head off into the sunset for the showdown to end all showdowns.
Aw man this was a blast to watch. You'd be amazed how entertaining a film that starts with a child being scarred by a straight razor can be. After that vicious opening we get to meet everyone, get to see what makes 'em tick, what their skills are, how far they'll go to get what they want. Everyone's having fun, in front of and behind the camera. In the opening moments you might fear we're in for a Tarantino fest but that feeling quickly disperses and the racism and horror his recent westerns were guilty of wallowing in are nowhere to be seen. It was an oppressive time and it's hinted at throughout but the characters never let themselves be held back by it. The films one partial use of a racial epithet is cut short by a bullet to the head and the tension afterwards is quickly and comically cut short by preposterous alternative suggestions from LaKeith Stanfield's ubercool gunslinger. For a film this darn violent the light tone it's handled with by director Jeymes Samuel is quite something.
One of the biggest western cliches is the slow build up to all out war in the final reel and The Harder They Fall takes it's time moving all it's pieces into place and sometimes it's guilty of moving a bit too slowly meaning the middle section of the movie feels kinda sluggish in places. But it's a small nitpick in what is undoubtedly an important watch. Whole swathes of the frontier were opened up in the late 1800's by freed slaves looking for a better life and Hollywood has nearly always ignored them. Films like Posse and TV shows like Hell on Wheels and Godless gave us a glance at how hard life was when you had dark skin in a land ruled by a gun and The Harder They Fall tells those stories while leaning into the romance of the western, the myth making, legendary side of it, it allows itself to have some fun with it all, letting loose with blasts of verve and energy that will leave you giddy.
When everything kicks off in the techicolored (sic) town of Redwood you'll be grinning at all it's knife spinning, dynamite throwing, head exploding madness. Our factual heroes becoming the superheroes of the west, taking down six men with six bullets while diving to avoid the seventh. Bloody chaos overlayed by a Jay-Z curated soundtrack, tunes from Lauren Hill, Seal (brother of director Jeymes Samuel) and Kid Cudi all leading us to the big showdown, when Idris Elba's Rufus, who's rather laidback throughout, gets his time to shine. Jonathan Winter's Nat Love though, he's a western hero you'll definitely want to spend more time with and it might just happen too, you never know.
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