You have heard of Rust and for all the wrong reasons. It will always be known as ‘the movie where Baldwin shot the director of photography’. This is a shame, as it’s not a bad movie, but at the same time, it’s far from great.
Rust stars Baldwin, Travis Fimmel, Patrick Scott McDermott, Frances Fisher, Jake Busey, Josh Hopkins, Travis Hammer, Devon Werkheiser and Chris Gann. Joel Souza is the writer and director.
The Story
I’m not a huge Western fan, but I did want to give this a good try with an open mind. The story is:
A boy left to fend for himself and his younger brother following their parents’ deaths in 1880s Wyoming goes on the run with his long-estranged grandfather after he is sentenced to hang for the accidental killing of a local rancher.
We meet Lucas (McDermott) and his younger brother, who are trying their best, but are orphans in the old west. Times are tough and their life is tougher, but they struggle through.
Lucas chases a wolf with a shotgun, hoping to kill it. He doesn’t, but fires a shotgun into the open world. He manages to hit and kill a random person. This was a little stupid, as Lucas lives in the middle of nowhere. I mean, there isn’t a single person for 100 miles in every direction, but he manages to hit the one poor sod that just happened to be passing by. Talk about bad luck for both of them.
Lucas is put on trial and sentenced to be hanged. In steps Fisher, who is a distant relative. She tries to help, but all she can do is take Lucas’ little brother away and look after him.
Rust (Baldwin) turns up, kills the sheriff and takes Lucas with him. Rust is a grizzled veteran of the old West, and no one messes with him. There’s a major problem there, but I’ll come back to that.
The rest of Rust is about them both making their way through the Old West, towards Mexico. Some bounty hunters pick up the trail, and that’s about it.
If I were to guess, I would say the ending was changed a little, which I won’t spoil, but Rust ends up the hero and then some. I might be wrong and it was the original ending, but with the events around the production, I would have said they changed it. Possibly to give Baldwin’s character a bit of redemption from the real-life issues.
Baldwin
The overall cast for Rust is good. McDermott is very good, he’s only young but carries the character well. One of the bounty hunters is Fimmel, who’s the main’ bad guy’, and again, he’s very good, someone you can get your teeth into.
The main issue with the cast is Baldwin. Don’t get me wrong, I like him (as an actor). I’m a big fan of 30 Rock, and his Jack Donaghy is perfect. He’s confident, rich and a smug ass of a man, but his sense of comic timing is perfect.
In Rust, he’s playing a gruff old gunfighter, and it just doesn’t work. As I said, I’m not a huge one for Westerns, but I know of people like Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and John Wayne. They are all tough, scary, and, when they play a gunfighter, are a gunfighter. If I met them in the Old West, I would be worried I might get shot at any moment.
Baldwin, as Rust, is not scary, grizzled or anything. If I met him in the Old West, I would be worried he might drop his gun if he needed to ‘sling’ it at any moment. I think he’s completely miscast in this role, which takes a huge chunk of the emotion out of it.
Run Time
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: make movies 90 minutes! There has never been a good movie over 90 minutes, apart from Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or The Godfather. I joke, I joke.
When you have a movie that is over 90 minutes, you have to keep the audience engaged. The start of Rust was a good setup, and I was intrigued by where it would go. When I met Rust, my interest waned a little. The middle of the movie is pretty boring.
When I watch a Western, I want to see gunfighters and barroom brawls. I know that’s not every Western, but it’s a staple of them. I don’t want to see Baldwin and Lucas connecting and the bounty hunters talking about their feelings.
Honestly, you could cut out about 30 – 45 minutes of this movie, and it would have been a lot tighter and more interesting.
Overall
Rust is, again, a good idea with bad execution, the trait of most Hollywood movies these days. With a better cast, a tighter script, the movie could have been great, but instead, it’s mediocre at best.
The ending is a little unsatisfying as well. Everything ties up nicely, but just in a ‘here’s the end of the movie…drive home safely’ type of way. It’s not a movie I’m going to think about again or one I would revisit.
You might get more mileage out of Rust, but I found the second act to be boring, to the point where I was picking up my phone. The ending kicked in, and then it ended; that’s about it.
There was a flashcard:
For Halyna
After the credits, there is a small piece from the director saying it was a difficult decision to release the movie. However, they wanted to honour Halyna’s final work. This was mixed because the final movie isn’t all that special.
The photography is gorgeous, and it looks and feels like the Old West. There’s no greenscreen here, well, if there was, I couldn’t see it. All of the set pieces are real, the houses are real, and the sunsets are real. It made a nice change.
The problem is, the story is thin, it’s too long, and Baldwin spoils it with his acting and what happened on set.
I give Rust a generous 2 out of 5 stars, and you can find it on VoD.
