The Weight

In 1933, single dad Sam Murphy (Ethan Hawke) returns from Church with his young daughter Penny (Avy Berry) to discover all their possessions on the stairway. Attempting to find a new place they can afford, Sam is brutally beaten in an alley, then sentenced to a harsh Oregon labor camp, Penny placed in a state run home where she will be put up for adoption before he is paroled. Recognizing the man's abilities, warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) offers him a deal - form a four man team to get the gold out of a friend's mine to safety before it's confiscated by the U.S. Government and he'll set him free in time to retrieve his daughter in "The Weight."

Laura's Review: B-

This throwback from screenwriters Matthew Booi, "Wildcat's" Shelby Gaines and Matthew Chapman ("The Ledge") plays something like "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" with a dash of "Sorceror" among many others, held aloft by Hawke's navigation of potentially lethal obstacles and Crowe's dialed down performance. Director Padraic McKinley (producer of Hawkes' 'The Good Lord Bird' series), makes his feature debut with a production that takes advantage of the German forests standing in for Oregon, but the film's lack of originality and shallowly written supporting characters make it something of a disappointment.

Clancy loves nothing more than watching his inmates' team, the Pirates, play baseball on a Sunday, but he demands an enormous boulder be moved or they'll lose the day off. Sam sits aside as Clancy notes that they'll never budge it without explosives. Sam, a WWI veteran and mechanic, appears to take this as a challenge, engineering a way for two men to accomplish the task, something Clancy acknowledges by inviting the man to shoot pigeons, have dinner and admire his 1918 Model T. But the car, 'acquired' from a bootlegger, has all kinds of mechanical issues and Sam again engenders the man's good graces by fixing it. During dinner, the deal will be struck.

And so Sam sets off with the men he's most familiar with (so we assume as the script hasn't forged any real relationships here),
Rankin (Austin Amelio, 'The Walking Dead's' Dwight), Singh (Avi Nash, "Learning to Drive"), Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), the latter presumably because of his size and brute strength as those packs containing gold bars are one of the weights of the title. The trip will take five days and they know they will be targets, but the first person to approach their camp is a Native American woman, Anna (Julia Jones, "Wind River"), looking for protection as she flees another mining camp. Arguments ensue, but Anna stays, becoming the group's cook and an ally of Sam's. After traversing a rickety rope bridge that can't take the weight of the gold via Sam's bravery and ingenuity, a stranger (Cameron Brady) will approach their camp that night, professing only to want food, but behaving more and more suspiciously until they throw him out. Sam knows the man will be on their trail. By the time they arrive at their destination, there will have been betrayals, a shootout and a murder and when Sam connects with Clancy's friend Taggert (Alec Newman, "The Boys in the Boat"), the script flips yet again. But nothing all that surprising happens and the film's resolution is oddly muted, one relationship hinted at, then abandoned.

While not Hawkes' most embraceable performance, his Sam is the reason we remain invested, the actor haunted by what fate has doled out to Sam while his intelligence and drive remain undiminished. Crowe can be guilty of overacting, so it is refreshing to see him underplay, his Clancy talking tough but somewhat fair, a likable 'villain.' But most supporting players are underdeveloped, Amelio appearing to be foe then whiplashing into friend, Nash defined by his socialist opining, Hazeldine by one act. Tønnesen's Olson gets a bit more background due to circumstance. Jones provides Anna force of personality, although it is surprising that as the only woman amidst felons she isn't threatened until the film's penultimate scene and her situation is left ambiguous in its last.

Cinematographer Matteo Cocco switches things up, keeping the film visually interesting. When those men are trying to dislodge that boulder, he's in their midst, shooting handheld, putting us right into the action, but his depiction of them in the wilderness is more traditionally shot. There's a lovely image of the tree canopy overhead which McKinley and his co-editor dissolve onto the hood of a truck traveling beneath it. "Wildcat" composers Latham and Shelby Gaines complement the action with regional period music.

When all is said and done, "The Weight" doesn't have all that much, a retread of works that have come before, albeit a well crafted one.

Vertical releases "The Weight" in theaters on 9/18/26.