3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Harder They Fall

2021, Jeymes Samuel (They Die by Dawn) -- Netflix

Can the world be nostalgic for Idris Elba? He's not quite hit the age of being that Fondly Remembered Aging Actor, but he is hitting a certain point in the roles he choses, or are being chosen for him. This movie needed a Villain, capital V, as a destination for the main character to finally reach, a character not too flashy, but impactful enough that we wanted to watch the movie. And Elba is That Guy.

But I get ahead of myself. 

The Harder They Fall is a classic western with a rather extremely updated fashion sense about it. Not that it is dressed better than your average western, but its dressed up better. Its all about style, looking and sounding good. Coming from the music industry, and working along side Jay Z and Baz Luhrman, Samuel gives us his second western with style. The first, They Die by Dawn is a weird not-short-not-full-length indie flick with its own ensemble and high hitting cast. I guess this would be a spiritual sequel?

Plot wise, we start with a setup, where a preacher man and his wife are killed in front of their young son by Elba's Rufus Buck. He leaves the boy alive with a cross cut into his forehead. Years later, the boy, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors, Loki) is a leader of gang, and he learns that the imprisoned Buck has been "released". That release was predicated by the government, who pardoned Buck in return for killing his Union Army jailors, who had become their own corrupt entity. Buck returns to the town he created, and we know  the movie will be about the confrontation between the two.

There are probably tons of pithy reviews of this very Netflix movie out there, maybe commenting on Samuel doing Tarantino, if Tarantino was black. Or doing a typical black gangster movie, but set in the Old West. I don't want to distill it, especially considering my purview. It is definitely a creation from an ideal, a definitively "black movie" soaked in cultural aspects, especially the dialogue and music choices. But it is also so precisely a stylistic Western, like much of the 60s and 70s heyday of Westerns, when they were coming from Italy or Spain as much as from the US. Samuel knows his source and makes it fucking gorgeous. And the use of reggae for transition music? chef's kiss gesture

If I was have anything detracting about it, its that it was such a concept that it ended up lacking in full characterization. The characters are just this side caricatures, not fully developed, but still very rich in detail. The performances lend to that. And that is the landscape in which it is set. I am very eager tos ee what he will do next.

Kent's post. We agree.