Verdict
Summary
It’s a grueling film to watch, and yet you’re compelled to see it through to its end. Filmmaker Gabe Polsky gives the film a real elegiac sense of style when it’s not grinding your eyes with animal murder and watching Cage go completely over the edge. I always welcome seeing a new Cage film, and this one was pretty solid, if also pretty punishing.
Plot:
A novice adventurer invests in a buffalo hunt, and discovers for himself the reality of such an endeavor.
Review:
Young and impressionable Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) has some money saved and he travels across the country to invest his money in a business worth investing in. Fate all but chooses for him: Buffalo hides. He aligns himself with a wild card of a buffalo hunter, a bald, intense man he meets in passing: Miller (Nicolas Cage), who promises Will that there’s a massive herd of buffalo way out there somewhere in no man’s land, but he need’s Will’s investment to undertake what he swears will be the ultimate hide haul and will net them a huge profit. Will buys in, and they hire another two men to join them – a rough rider with a shady past named Fred (very well cast Jeremy Bobb) and a one-handed old timer named Hoge (Xander Berkeley who disappears in the role) who will be their cook. The four of them venture way out and do eventually find Miller’s elusive and legendary herd, but as Miller begins the hunt, the hides pile up and keep piling up with literally thousands of dead buffalo to waste. The weeks turn to months as Miller loses himself to an ungodly obsession with literally wiping out the entire herd, and he locks the crew into their little valley as the seasons change and they become trapped for the winter, with no hope of returning back to civilization to sell off their insane bounty. Through Will’s eyes we see the utter madness and folly of Miller’s foolhardy plan, but Miller is so in the zone of his murderous rampage of killing the whole herd that it likely seems as if the four men will never return home …
An unusual plot for a western and a really committed performance by Cage makes Butcher’s Crossing worth watching, but as the film goes on, the likelihood of you ever wanting to watch it again diminishes when we realize where it’s heading. It’s a story of madness and the pointlessness of the slaughtering of thousands of buffalo, which nearly made the American buffalo extinct. It’s a grueling film to watch, and yet you’re compelled to see it through to its end. Filmmaker Gabe Polsky gives the film a real elegiac sense of style when it’s not grinding your eyes with animal murder and watching Cage go completely over the edge. I always welcome seeing a new Cage film, and this one was pretty solid, if also pretty punishing.
Sony has just released Butcher’s Crossing onto Blu-ray and a DVD. No special features are included.
