The Ironic Part of FRONTIER CRUCIBLE

FRONTIER CRUCIBLE (Blu-ray)

2025 / 122 min

Well Go USA

Review by Stinky the Destroyer😾

Frontier Crucible is a western produced by Dallas Sonnier and written by S. Craig Zahler, who aren’t strangers to the genre. They’re the guys responsible for unleashing Bone Tomahawk on the world. And if you’ve seen that one, love it or hate it, chances are you haven’t forgotten it. That won’t be the case here, for multiple reasons, one of which is kind of ironic.

Based on an old pulp novel by Harry Whittington, the basic plot is pretty good. Ex-soldier Merrick Beckford (Myles Clohessy) is tasked with taking a wagon of medicine to a town suffering from an epidemic. To do this, he must travel across hostile Apache country by himself. Along the way, Beckford comes across a group who were just recently attacked…a trio of outlaws led by Mule (Thomas Jane) and a young married couple, Valerie (Mary Stickley) and Jeff (Eli Brown), the latter who’s been seriously wounded. 

Suspecting the apaches will return, Beckford offers to take them with him. Mule insists they should head in the opposite direction, leading to tense conflicts, especially with one of Mule’s gang, Edmund (Armie Hammer), repeatedly threatening Beckford. The situation is compounded when Mule’s son, Billy (Ryan Mason), shoots an lone Apache who Beckford was preparing to negotiate with. Knowing this will incur the wrath of the whole tribe, the group needs to get moving as soon as possible, but Jeff’s wounds and constant disagreements on which direction to go keeps them put…until it’s too late.

The story ain’t the problem. It’s the execution. First off, Frontier Crucible is light on action and extremely slow moving. Worse yet, it’s over two hours long, and most of that time consists of these folks constantly bickering, as well as increasingly rote song interludes about cowboy life (all warbled by the same guy with a guitar). In the disc’s making-of feature, director Travis Mills brags of cranking out 12 westerns in 12 months. Perhaps he should consider taking a little extra time in the editing room instead, because this story could have just as easily been told in less than 90 minutes.

"I told ya we should've gassed 'er up at the last town."

Some of the performances are decent (Jane, in particular, is a stand-out), but most range from bland to godawful. Hammer appears happy to simply have a job, while dreary leading man Clohessy must have prepared for his role by watching Clint Eastwood westerns. I’ll give him this much…he’s mastered the art of dramatically removing the smoke from his mouth to say something important (he must do it a dozen times here). But Clohessy is Daniel Day-Lewis compared to Stickly, whose wooden performance sinks every scene she appears in and exacerbates how terrible much of the dialogue is…

…which brings us to the ironic reason the film doesn’t work. Screenwriter S. Craig Zahler has a reputation for writing and directing gritty, uncompromising films that are definitely an acquired taste, but at least feel authentic in terms of characters and dialogue. But here, that dialogue is often jawdroppingly bad, sometimes laughably so. This is especially the case with Stickly’s character. Nearly every syllable that escapes her mouth might have the viewer going, “Good God, nobody speaks like that…even in the old west.” I suspect Zahler knew he pumped-out a pooch, too, because his name doesn’t appear anywhere in the credits.

The film is almost rescued by a climax that boasts the same type of gonzo, wince-inducing violence that made Bone Tomahawk a memorable cult classic, but this time it’s too little, too late. Long, slow and atrociously written, Frontier Crucible is a interminable endurance test.

EXTRA KIBBLES

MAKING-OF FEATURETTE

TRAILER