Throughout the 90s and the aughts, so few people were making Westerns and so few Westerns that got made were any good that it felt like the genre was dying. There were some rumblings of a resurgence back in 2010 when the Coen brothers made a bunch of money and got a bunch of critical acclaim with their True Grit remake though—and with the release of Slow West, Bone Tomahawk, and The Hateful Eight last year (which were all awesome to varying degrees), it started to look like we were on the verge of a full-on Western renaissance. Maybe those films raising expectations is why Jane Got a Gun feels like such a disappointment. Conversely, maybe the lowered expectations the genre came with for so long is why it also feels like Jane Got a Gun should be given a pass for being such a disappointment. Either way you cut it though, the sad truth is that, like most movies that get released in January, Jane Got a Gun has a lot of problems.
The film opens with a man (Noah Emmerich) returning home to his wife and child and their isolated ranch with a small handful of bullets in his body, dying. That’s not the worst of his situation though. The worst is that the bullets were put in him because he crossed a powerful gang of outlaws, the sort of gang who isn’t going to be happy with just seriously injuring an enemy, so now they’re on his trail, they aim on finishing the job of murdering him, and they’ll likely also take care of the wife and the kid when they get there. The wife is Jane (Natalie Portman), and given the fact that her husband has been incapacitated, it falls on her to protect her home and her family. The twist there is that the only gunslinger she knows who might help her is her ex-fiancé (Joel Edgerton). He answers her call, begrudgingly, but once he’s in the house of his former love and her new husband, bad feelings begin to bubble to the surface. Add that to the ticking clock element of the gang of outlaws on their way to wreak havoc, and this doesn’t turn out to be a good situation for anyone.
If you want to start to talk about the problems with Jane Got a Gun, you can probably start by addressing its filmmaking. Nothing jumps out about the way this film was put together, whatsoever. It’s got no style, no panache, no visual flair, which feels very strange for a movie set in the Old West. Westerns are generally known for their gorgeous depictions of vast landscapes, their gritty portrayals of extreme violence, but there’s none of that here. It’s not clear how much blame for that can be laid at the feet of director Gavin O’Connor though, because this film very famously had a troubled period of pre-production that involved a revolving door of potential directors and potential stars signing on and then dropping out, and by the time O’Connor took over he was already behind schedule and set up to direct a cast of actors who were just arriving as last minute replacements. Seeing as how he’s been able to make an awesome movie with a less intriguing setup in the past (Warrior), he might deserve to be cut some slack this time around.
A lack of vision in its direction isn’t Jane Got a Gun’s only issue though. The script that O’Connor shot definitely wasn’t anything to write home about. It opens with the mortally wounded husband showing back up at his house, which is initially nice because it immediately establishes the stakes of the situation and throws us right into the tense and interesting part of the story, but which is ultimately dumb because a huge part of the story told here is the romantic drama that exists between the three main players, so we need to know who they are in order for us to care about their relationships. Because we start off not knowing their history together, the film decides to fill us in on their past with periodic flashbacks that break into the action, and that isn’t a decision that works out well whatsoever.
The dialogue in these flashbacks is the clunky sort of dialogue that only exists when a movie isn’t confident enough in things like subtle characterization and nuanced acting to tell the audience what it needs to know about its characters, and then there’s also the problem that the flashbacks constantly interrupt the film’s narrative momentum, which should be driven completely by the life and death stakes of the impending gun fight that’s inevitably going to serve as the climax. Honestly, nobody was ever going to care about the stupid love triangle in this movie, so constantly delaying the very interesting impending massacre with things like flashbacks to romantic hot air balloon rides (yes, the characters randomly ride a hot air balloon, in a gritty Western) was a terrible move. Jane Got a Gun barely lasts longer than an hour and a half, but it ends up feeling twice that.
The performances are a mixed bag that go from acceptable to bad, so they can’t be held up as a positive of the film either. Portman’s high society face just doesn’t fit in a frontier setting, so one wonders why this entire project was built around her starring in the first place. Plus, she’s never at her best when she’s trying to sell some kind of accent that isn’t natural to her (see: that pregnant at Walmart movie), so you spend most of the movie scrutinizing her speech and shaking your head at how weird she sounds. She’s a strong actress when she’s in the right part, but this definitely isn’t a part that plays to her strengths. Edgerton is much better as the male lead. He sells the pain of protecting a past love and her new husband without letting the situation turn melodramatic, and despite the fact that he’s from Australia, he’s much better at naturally sounding like he’s from the western United States than his co-star. Emmerich is generally wasted as the husband. He’s a strong actor, but he only gets a scene or two to show any range. Mostly he’s just asked to lay in a bed and look sweaty while bleeding out, which could have been accomplished by anyone. Perhaps the biggest curiosity of the film is Ewan McGregor as the leader of the bad guys. He looks so generic with dark hair and a cowboy goatee and he gets so little opportunity to do anything important that he basically fades away into the scenery. I didn’t even know it was him until I looked at the end credits.
That’s not to say that everything in Jane Got a Gun is terrible though. I’ll always have a soft spot for any movie that includes a scene where someone cauterizes a wound with gun powder, and that happens here. Also, there’s a lot of deadly chaos that breaks out on account of the fact that the protagonists make a bunch of bombs in canning jars, which is awesome. They should have called this movie Jane Got a Jar Bomb. It would have still been bad, but at least it would have been aware of how bad it is.
