Review: BROKEN HORSES Deserves A Swift Mercy Killing

Contributing Writer; Toronto, Canada (@triflic)
Review: BROKEN HORSES Deserves A Swift Mercy Killing

Where does one draw the line between pitiable and risible? On the one hand, it just seems mean to want to pick on the slowest kid in the class, especially when you see just how far behind they are lagging. On the other hand, if that kid is driving around in a shiny new Mustang, throwing money around and name-dropping willy-nilly, the urge to slap them upside the head becomes palpable.

Featuring a set-piece of murder and double cross cut to the squeezing of fresh oranges, it should be audacious, but instead is stilted and clumsy due to any lack of audience investment for those being murdered. Here, another scene features a crazy music teacher buzzing around in a steampunk wheelchair and begging his former student for death against the back-drop projection of Buster Keaton's The General

Furthermore, a doughy Vincent D'Onofrio projects his quality brand of menace into an echo-chamber of who-gives-a-shit. Gluing these disparate scenes together is some seriously over-baked hamminess that errs just on the side of not being batshit crazy enough; a Venn diagram where incompetence, hubris and lucre form the overlapped centre.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 11 million dollar (US) cross-over from Bollywood to Hollywood, the family-melodrama-cum-Western Broken Horses, is a film that was personally blessed by the current prime minster of India, Narendra Modi, and showcases enthusiastic quotes of endorsement from James Cameron and Alfonso Cuarón on its poster. 

His colleagues are too kind by far. Even though it is only April, I will hazard a guess that there will be no other movie, made at this cost anyway, more tone-deaf and faultily executed for the remainder of the year. It is perhaps better if we all forget this picture ever made it to a theatrical release. I am even more certain that this is what the collection of talented folks in front of and behind the camera are probably wishing could happen. 

However, brave reader, if you have a hankering for masochism (or schadenfreude) feel free to soldier-on.

All the signs are present in the opening scene. Thomas Jane has an awkward overly expositional conversation with the oldest of his two sons, while they shoot targets in the desert. It goes on for an interminable length, showcasing Jane's utter disinterest in the anything happening in the scene,  except what is perhaps on offer at the craft services table just outside the frame. His lack of engagement is a sore thumb right up to the moment where he is suddenly shot in the face from an offscreen mystery assassin. 

The questionable motivation for this killing, outside of servicing a plot involving only the vaguest notion of gang warfare coming from both sides of the Texas-Mexican border, is never addressed in the screenplay. Ordinary townspeople, outside a lone scene of the sheriff's funeral, are absence from every other location for no apparent reason other than the someone forgot to bring the extras to the set on every day of principle photography except one.

The story then jumps to fifteen years later, where the sheriff's two surviving sons, Buddy (a serenely blank-faced Chris Marquette), and his younger bother Jakey (a darkly curled Anton Yelchin) re-unite in the dusty little town on the eve of Jacob's wedding. Buddy, an eager to please simpleton, who never left, now works as a hired gun for the local crime syndicate run by Julian (D'Onofrio). 

The younger scion is a now a concert violinist living in swanky New York City digs (albeit clearly a soundstage), his innocence preserved via payments from his older brother's work shooting Mexican goons in the face. It's not long before Jakey and his hot Spanish-American fiancé (María Valverde, last seen in Ridley Scott's Exodus) are embroiled in Buddy's aww-shucks pickle of a moral die-lemma. Worth mentioning is the fact that Jakey is a condescending faux-sympathetic asshole.

I won't bog this review down with the mountain of plot on display, but suffice it to say that Broken Horses is a remake of Chopra's own 1989 Bollywood gangster picture, Parinda, which at 154 minutes, I can only guess is more sensical, because the director is in his own element, rather than flailing around in the American West, a place - a genre - where he may know a few of the notes, but cannot hear, let alone play, the music. An oft rehearsed wedding speech is bananas, I tell you! Bananas!  

Another about putting down a broken horse (seriously folks) is egregious how it talks down to both Buddy as a character, and more importantly, any prospective audience. It is as if Chopra feels that the audience for his movie is embarking on their first viewing ever, of a motion picture, in any country. 

Shot on location in Death Valley and Mexico by Tom Stern, Clint Eastwood's regular cinematographer since 2002's Bloodwork, all of the glorious wide-screen cinematography is marred by muddled narrative, and any coherent sense of mise-en-scene insofar as it is related visual storytelling. 

The film is a showcase simultaneously too much and too little of everything. Mainly in the form of nails-on-the-chalkboard storytelling, and reams and reams of on the nose dialogue. Add in some seriously ill-advised day-for-night photography, and a blunt climax involving egregious CGI fire, and any sort of craft that Chopra's Hollywood crew bring to the table suffers an ignoble drowning. 

I say this with full consideration of the technical departments which consist of talented individuals who also worked on Kill Bill, Drive, Herzog's Bad LieutenantCollateral, Men in Black, Batman ReturnsThe CoolerJarhead and Where The Wild Things Are, to name but a sliver their film credits. I seriously question how these folks ended up behind the scenes in this fiasco. I bet they wish they didn't, as Broken Horses constituted of only two hours of my life (well, plus writing this review), yet it sure felt like weeks. The lazy editing and obvious directorial choices exacerbate the tedium. Mightily. 

In a year packed with interesting Westerns of various sizes from directors such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Quentin Tarantino, Ti West, and hell, even Thomas Jane (hopefully more engaged in his own film than here), there is no reason to waste your time with this junk. Heck, since Broken Horses has the gall to associate itself with Keaton's masterpiece, re-watch a copy of The General, it is slightly more than half the length and immeasurably better.

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