Planting Nicolas Cage in a traditional western is a recipe for success. Cage in anything is a draw now that a second wind is firmly behind him. The Old Way was going to make the rounds of Cage fans regardless of quality, his name is now a draw beyond most for smaller circles. Consequences of a shady past, moments of action and all to the tune of Cage as he rages once again. A fun resurgence it may be for Cage, who throughout the opening of Brett Donowho’s The Old Way sports a moustache that rivals the horrors of Val Kilmer in Tombstone. What The Old Way cannot rival is the quality of Tombstone though, its traditional western genre charm and the typical story of revenge in the old west are a tad wasted.
A bulk of the problems with The Old Way are in the smaller choices. Soundtrack troubles particularly are the real issue here, with banjo-plucking nonsense, overproduced and constant musical dullness striking through as if trying to play up a hokey western comedy. It is filler where filler is not needed. Cage’s presence on screen and the character dynamics that begin to flow with Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s performance are solid enough to work without the need for sound. Sparsely populated towns are dependent on the few that populate them to provide some real interest in the area. Cage and his store is a decent introduction to the few people necessary to the story, although they provide little in the way of quality.
Where that quality lies though is in the back and forth between gunslinger Colton Briggs (Cage) and his daughter Brooke Briggs (Armstrong). Shiloh Fernandez provides some decent work as a villainous bloke wanting revenge, it is an inevitable performance that sees constant pursuit and close encounters. Clint Howard appears too, an awful representation of the so-called humorous moments. Still, his first line of dialogue is “I’ve been kicked in the balls,” quality was not long for that man’s performance. Nor was it for Cage and company, with the Academy Award-winner obviously taking the lead in quality moments throughout The Old Way, a standard western with the word “traditional” applied to it to perform some heavy lifting in the slower moments. The Briggs pair are set on doing it the old way, after all. That careful notion of an eye for an eye is planted early, and expanded on with fair interest and some solid performances.
But there is no notion that The Old Way is going to provide something new. It feels stuffy and comfortable in the conformity it brings to the table. Cage is solid, checking another genre off of his endless list of achievements. Come for Cage, stay for Cage, it is all the same to the overwrought technical qualities of The Old Way. There is still some quality from Cage and Armstrong, pushing through the hammy dialogue and very standard direction from Donowho. It is not his working of the camera that comes into question but the decisions that come in the editing room. Blasted out and drowned in sound, The Old Way has a spark to it, a legacy defined more by the first-time Cage western experience than anything else.
