Rent In a Valley of Violence (2016)

The awkward cousin... - In a Valley of Violence review by Schrödinger's Cake

You know how when you meet someone for the first time, and within a few minutes they start to be annoying because they’re trying a bit too hard? That’s this film.

It wants to be a grindhouse, spaghetti-western, full of cool, quotable lines, but it ends up just being an awkward cousin. So, as much as you want to give it a chance and to try to like it, you spend most of the film with one eye on the clock waiting for the credits to roll, so you can escape the wall of awkwardness.

Lukewarm spaghetti, reheated once too often - In a Valley of Violence review by Count Otto Black

Right from the opening credits, which precisely mimic the crude animations seen at the start of all three films in Clint Eastwood's "Dollars" trilogy, and are accompanied by music which desperately tries (without success) to sound like the work of Ennio Morricone, it's clear that this movie is doing its best to recreate the gleeful mayhem of the classic spaghetti westerns. Alas, it fails dismally.

Director Ti West has absolutely no idea how to capture the over-the-top cartoon carnage of the films he's so obviously inspired by. At almost no point does anything violent happen without a lengthy preamble revealing exactly what's about to occur long before it does, allowing one or more characters to beg for their lives at considerable length, appeal for everybody else to be reasonable, or simply ramble on about something utterly irrelevant. When, very early on, the baddest of the bad guys insists on having a fight with the hero for no particular reason, it takes such an absurdly long time for what turns out to be the most underwhelming fist-fight you'll ever see to actually start that even the character trying to start it becomes aware that something really should have happened by now. I almost expected the townspeople to go all Monty Python and shout in chorus: "Get on with it!"

Numerous western tropes are dropped into the mix and horribly misused. John Travolta, who has shown in other recent films what a splendidly menacing character actor he can be, phones it in as that tired old cliché, the patriarch who rules the town a little too sternly and has a son who's absolutely rotten. When he stares into the muzzle of a gun and pleads for his son's life, he sounds like a sitcom dad trying to persuade a sulky adolescent brat to tidy his bedroom. But by that time, the viewer will be no more engaged in the painfully listless "action" than he is.

Ti West has noticed that spaghetti westerns often featured comedy, therefore the cast includes an extremely well-trained dog which performs various zany bits of business, appears to understand English perfectly, and is probably the smartest character in the movie. And then, because spaghetti westerns were sometimes very violent indeed, we're treated to an explicit close-up of blood spurting from severed neck arteries. What West fails to grasp is that although these two things could both plausibly appear in spaghetti westerns, they should never both be in the same one. This woefully misguided attitude, along with West's total ineptitude at directing action, and a hero so angst-ridden and reluctant to do anything that he might as well be called Hamlet, dooms this to be the sort of film in which the hero drones on endlessly about how killing people is wrong, and then shoots someone in the head. And worst of all, it's rather dull.

A treat for western fans - In a Valley of Violence review by Alphaville

Despite a poor opening, this is a top-drawer loner-seeks-vengeance western. Like John Wick in the Wild West, our loner hero (Ethan Hawke) is lumbered with flashbacks and a dog that understands everything he says to it – a stagey device to allow the viewer to know what he’s thinking. Happily matters improve when baddies rightly take umbrage with the mutt and give Ethan cause to advance the plot and begin his revenge spree. Not before he explains all this over the dog’s grave, of course.

Although there’s too much time spent anthropomorphising the animal as if it were Rin Tin Tin, the excellence of the film’s second half surprisingly turns it into an irresistible western, rising to an exciting climax laced with deadpan humour. Even John Travolta as the town marshall Ethan is up against puts in a solid shift for once, and there’s an appealing dynamic with the teenage hotel keeper (Taissa Farmiga) who takes a shine to the loner in town. A spaghetti western vibe adds to the fun, especially in the opening titles and in Jeff Grace’s iconic score, paying homage to Morricone.

Once it gets going, this is writer/director Ti West’s best film yet and, if not reaching the status of classics such as Unforgiven and Open Range, proves that a good western can still hit the spot.