The Old Way (2023) - Review

 The Old Way is Cage's first tradiitonal Western. He plays a former outlaw, Colton Briggs, who at some point after his introduction in the beginning scene settles down and starts a family. When a batch of outlaws come by his ranch, led by the son of an accused man shot to death by Briggs, they murder his wife for retribution for Brigg's past. Briggs and his daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), set out to find the men who  took their wife and mother from them.

Watching this movie reminded me of the other movies that Cage has had a role in from Saban Films: it feels overproduced. While the film makers capture the spirit of the western, the production value of the movie is way too distracting. By all means and measures, the movie looks great, but it lacks imperfections or grit to what is seen on screen and how the characters progress. Cage is wonderful in his role as an otherwise cold and unfeeling robot of a man, hiding his true feelings from his daughter after the death of his wife, and struggles with the notion that he has to still care for his daughter while returning to his lawless past. There is a point in the movie where he realizes that his daughter may have the same emotional deficit as himself, but tries to impress upon her that she must feel emotions for other people's sake if she wants to navigate the world. In this way, the acting by Armstrong progresses in quality as her character is continually allowed to feel emotions and manipulate those around her. There are a few points in the story where I felt that it went beyond cliché and into something different, but there was not enough time to sit and get to know the full cast - whenever something became interesting to me, the plot moved right along, knowing that its runtime was catching up to it. Given a larger script and allowing the characters to really fill the screen might have eliminated some hesitation that I have to really beam about the end result. The Old Way is a good movie, one that you can see had potential to be even better.