PREVIOUSLY: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST
After being found guilty of a minor crime, JR (Brenton Thwaites) befriends and helps hardened criminal Brendan (Ewan McGregor) escape from an Australian prison. Brendan takes JR under his wing for a gold heist. But tensions flare between the two when JR develops romantic feelings for Tasha (Alicia Vikander,) a woman who has been human trafficked by the criminal organization they’re working for.
This movie wasn’t bad. Especially compared to some of the dreck I’ve had to watch recently and some I have incoming. It was just kind of forgettable and disappointing.
The opening sequence in the prison really is the most tense and compelling part of the movie. After some back-and-forth, JR has been forced to accept Brendan’s offer of safety, which comes with strings attached. You’re just starting to wonder how this is going to play out for the next three to six months they’re all stuck in there together. Then, boom, it hits you with that SIX MONTHS LATER title card, and we skip straight past it. You don’t need to worry your pretty little head about it. The movie is convinced the prison sequence was just a prologue to the real story that happens on the outside, but the rest of it is so cliché-ridden and boring in comparison.
The prison break sequence is also pretty good. But after that it just becomes another heist movie, with nothing to make it stand out. It’s unfortunate.
The movie’s really trying to say something about fathers and sons, and it just never quite comes together. JR had an abusive dad, and Brendan slots right into that role for him. He protects JR, but also JR had better do exactly as he says or there’ll be consequences. JR, who’s never had a healthy relationship with a father figure, accepts all this very easily. Until he meets Tasha and decides he wants to start a life with her away from all the crime. But by now he’s in too deep with Brendan to just walk away.
They fight, then they make up, but as the movie progresses, it seems like the tension between them is building and building as JR resents Brendan’s control and Brendan snaps at JR for testing his limits. Surely this can only end in bloodshed for one or both of them. Surely the son will have to kill his abusive father to get away, or the father will kill his son before he lets him go.
Nah. In the end, after Tasha ditches them, Brendan decides they’ll flee the country by escaping on the high seas. Once they’re in the sailboat, Brendan pulls a gun on JR and tells him ominously that it’s the end of the line for him. Oh, don’t worry, he’s not going to kill him. He’s just going to send him back to shore with a fraction of his fair cut. He was using him all along, but he’s not going to kill him.
But then JR reveals that in spite of him tagging along like a lost puppy this whole time, somewhere along the way he made up with Tasha offscreen and together they double-crossed Brendan. I guess this is supposed to be the twist that heist movies sometimes have that recontextualizes everything? It doesn’t. It’s incredibly predictable, and leaving it all offscreen just feels like a lazy “gotcha.”
Tasha has all the money, and she can see them from her position on the shore. If Brendan shoots JR, she’ll call the police.
Enraged that the student has now become the teacher, Brendan tackles JR into the water. We learned earlier that JR doesn’t know how to swim, and this is also tied up in his trauma about his abusive father. Well, JR still has not found the time to learn to swim. After thinking better of it, Brendan pulls JR back onto the boat and resuscitates him. JR says they’ll tell him later where his half of the money is. Brendan lets him go. JR and Tasha embrace on the shore as a song I swore was going to be “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri plays us all the way out to the credits, a truly jarring change from the rest of the movie’s soundtrack.
Brendan is later recognized as a criminal on the run. He’s arrested and sent back to prison. There, he looks fondly on a picture JR has sent him of a pregnant Tasha, and looks up at the sky through his cell window, the sun shining down on him, the picture of a redeemed man.
The problem with that ending is, the movie’s too focused on everything else to really believably develop their relationship so it gets to this point. It’s too caught up in having us wonder if Tasha’s going to betray JR, and what’s going on in the war between Sam (Jacek Koman) and Brendan, and what about the family of their buddy who got killed, and will there always be one more job, and how are they going to flee the country. It just doesn’t keep all those balls in the air very well. The ending is trying to be both a surprise and an emotional catharsis, but it just never gets there in either case.
I don’t buy that JR has finally become savvy enough to lull Brendan into a false sense of security while he steals from him right under his nose. I don’t buy that Brendan would let JR live once he found out. I don’t buy that in the end, he loves JR more than the money.
I do believe that Brendan is a very complicated character, and easily the highlight of the movie is Ewan’s portrayal of him. He’s a cutthroat criminal, but he also has his own set of morals and sense of honor. He does clearly have a kind of fondness for JR, torn between pulling him into a life of crime and protecting him from that life. There are lines he won’t cross. He doesn’t trust women because the only woman he ever loved turned him in or something. But also he doesn’t abide rape or the shooting of innocent hostages. But also he’s not above torturing people if they stand in his way. And also if you double-cross him, you’re extra dead.
Do you see what I mean? With the tension between him and JR slowly building as JR chafes under his control, it just wasn’t believable to me that he’d gotten to the point where he cared enough about JR’s happiness to just let a betrayal slide. He’d just cheated JR out of his fair share, or thought he did. Finding out that JR had taken everything would have been his breaking point, I thought, and this all ends in tragedy. Not so. JR outmaneuvers him and Brendan can respect that, I guess. It feels very contrived. JR gets his second chance and Brendan rots forever in prison. Because he definitely got more than a few decades after this latest crime spree, and he’s not gonna get yard privileges ever again after he escaped in a fucking sightseeing helicopter he got his little buddy to hijack. But it’s okay, because Brendan has learned to love and trust people again. Somehow. Oh, well. Maybe our anger management issues were the real prison all along.
Pretty much the only thing that makes it work even a little is Ewan’s performance. By turns charming and terrifying, he plays Brendan with an edge and only an occasional depth of emotion. There’s no doubt he could snap and kill someone if they get on his bad side. But particularly with that scene in the prison early on–where he ushers JR back to his cell and urges him to keep moving as his buddies kill JR’s would-be rapist–there’s a calm, fatherly assurance that I wish we’d gotten to see more of. There’s another glimpse of it when he tells JR before the heist that he’ll need to get in the hostages’ faces, wave his gun around, and yell that he’s going to kill them. JR looks freaked out. Brendan quietly tells him to make them believe him. Unspoken is the fact that if they believe him, they’ll do as he says and he won’t actually have to kill anyone. That kind of calm, perversely comforting advice could have been utilized more instead of some of the other dialogue choices we get. I would have found JR’s dilemma of being emotionally torn between Tasha and Brendan way more compelling, and I would have believed that Brendan really might have cared enough about JR to let him go.
Speaking of the dialogue, there’s a running theme of JR being Brendan’s monkey. It starts with the aforementioned scene of Brendan explaining how the heist’s gonna go: They’re gonna get someone inside first, who’ll then hold the employees hostage on his own before getting them to open the door for the rest of the team. He describes this person as “the monkey,” dancing around and getting their attention. JR asks who the monkey’s going to be. It’s him. Brendan apparently meant this literally, because while all the other guys partially cover their faces with gaiters, JR gets a full rubber monkey mask. A chimp, specifically. This is important for later.
After Brendan, JR, and Tasha escape from the mob, JR tells Brendan he’s sick of all this and that he can find himself a new monkey. Okay, we get it. After all three of them get in a physical altercation that ends with Brendan choking JR, Brendan then takes the time to further explain a very labored metaphor: There are two kinds of monkeys–chimpanzees, who’ll fight to the death if they have to; and bonobos, who just fuck each other all day. JR’s like, Right, lovers and fighters. Yeah, we get it. Brendan says that the bonobos, in spite of the constant fucking, are going extinct, and JR better figure out fast what kind of monkey he is. These hardened criminals play this scene with completely straight faces while drinking after a very intense fight. There’s also a painting of a chimp on the wall behind Brendan. We get it. And it’s right around here the script kinda falls apart, and not just because chimps and bonobos are both apes and not monkeys at all.
It fucking comes in again at what’s supposed to be the big emotional resolution. Brendan has saved JR from drowning even though JR has taken everything from him. He fondly calls JR an idiot. JR proudly declares that he’s a bonobo. Brendan asks if that makes him a chimp. Oh my god, WE GET IT.
The very last line they leave us on is JR, in a note to Brendan back in prison, telling him where his half of the gold is for when he gets out (lol.) It’s written on the back of the picture of Tasha showing off her pregnant belly. JR’s voiceover says, “Here’s some proof that the bonobos aren’t dying out.” Brendan looks beatifically up to heaven. The end. Ta da! They really thought they were doing something with that. I could have done with more complicated emotional bonding instead of the monkey parable.
For the past few years, I’ve found it really interesting when movies decide to show their characters watching another movie. Specifically, I’m fascinated by which movies filmmakers choose to spotlight in their own films. (See The Bride of Frankenstein and Breaking Dawn; I do know in that case it’s because Bill Condon is doing a nod to his Gods and Monsters biopic of James Whale, the last time he ever earned unjustified critical acclaim, but I was still stunned by that decision.)
Sometimes it’s just the vibes of another scene that match the feelings of the character in the movie we’re watching. Sometimes it helps set the place or time. Sometimes it’s a metatextual commentary for those who are familiar with the movie-in-the-movie, that aligns thematically with what they’re currently watching. Sometimes it’s a simple little nod to a mentor or inspiration. Sometimes it’s a fictional movie, made specifically for the real movie. Sometimes it’s just something in the public domain or whatever they could get the rights to. There are lots of reasons why a filmmaker might show a brief snippet of another movie in their movie. Usually there’s not a deep reason for what they pick, but I’m still fascinated by the process anyway.
Of course, sometimes, whatever intention the filmmakers had doesn’t work out. Often, this is because you’re watching a subpar movie that goes out of its way to remind you that other, better movies exist, and you could be watching one of those right now instead. Hubris of the highest order. As the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000 always said, “Never remind people of a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie.”
Well, Son of a Gun doesn’t do that.
The partnership between Brendan and JR has grown incredibly strained. They’re holed up in a motel as they wait for the right time to flee to international waters. Brendan is showering with the bathroom door open. JR is sitting in a chair in view of the bathroom doorway. He moves from the chair to one of the beds and turns the television on. For context, when the television or radio has been turned on every time previously in this movie, it’s been a news report on the last known movements of the criminals. This is an established pattern, priming us for suspense as JR grabs the remote and flicks the TV on.
At the sound of the TV, Brendan pokes his head out from the bathroom and snaps that he told JR to sit where he could see him. JR limply insists that he’s just watching TV, then caves and moves back to the seat Brendan assigned him, turning the TV so he can see it from there.
We can hear part of the movie playing and see a brief glimpse of the screen before JR turns it away. It’s not the news. It’s not another crime or suspense movie. It’s not something ironic like a sitcom with a loud, grating laugh track. It’s not even a nature documentary about their precious monkeys. It’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Not the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version. No silhouettes at the bottom of the screen. It’s the full theatrical cut, presumably. Specifically, it’s the “We need a Santa Claus on Mars” scene. JR is pissy because Brendan demands he sit where he can see him…while he watches Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. And then the scene just ends. Fascinating. I have no idea what it means, but it’s fascinating.
Maybe I was a little hard on this movie. There are heist films I enjoy, but as a genre, they’re not usually my thing. This was the debut of director and screenwriter Julius Avery, and it was ambitious. As stated, I think the extended “what kind of monkey are you” metaphor needed to be excised. It ends up being more unintentionally funny than anything.
While I found the beginning particularly strong, the movie ultimately has too much to say and doesn’t know how to say it effectively. It’s trying to do two themes: The escape from the cycle of being caught in a life of crime, as well as the complicated dynamic between fathers and sons. It ends up doing justice to neither.