‘Two Outlaws (Rust)’: an old man, a child and a cursed weapon | Cinema: previews and reviews

Two Outlaws (Rust) is the story of a lonely grandfather wanted by the law and his eldest grandson, a boy involved in a random murder. In a script twist between the prophetic and the strange, the third character of this western with vast natural landscapes is a rifle, a family heirloom which, like any weapon, ends up causing misfortune. This is what happened with the cursed revolver of the terrible event that surrounded the creation of this film: the involuntary murder of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins when one of the protagonist’s, Alec Baldwin’s, weapons turned out not to be blank but loaded and ended his life.

Putting this aside, rust It’s a western that you can see, but which is slow and bloated in its almost two and a half hours of film. The heart of the story – an old murderer redeemed thanks to the eldest son of the daughter he once lost – suffers from an excess of geographical context which contributes rather little. The Western rite does not require so many cartographic details, and the film jumps from one city to another, exhibiting a presumed historical rigor that ends up making you dizzy.

The journey of Rust (Alec Baldwin’s character) refers to the great tragedies of the West through the marked and violent face of this grandfather persecuted by the law. The incredible landscapes he travels through with his grandson contain all the elements of the genre: from sheriff to the bounty hunter, to nomadic men against sedentary women, to fur trappers, to Indians and to the first stones (the hall, the prison…) of the future cities of a country under construction.

Director Joel Souza presents his characters as if he had the long run of a series ahead of him and not that of a film. The bounty hunter played by Travis Fimmel seems like a bad copy of the one played by Joel Edgerton in the magnificent series The subwayby Barry Jenkins. All those diversions (oh, where are you, Clint Eastwood?) aren’t very interesting and take away from the power of what really matters, the story of an old killer willing to save himself through a child. And maybe it would have been smart to eliminate the damn rifle thing.