The Harder They Fall

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Netflix

Director: Jeymes Samuel
Starring: Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba & Regina King 
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hours & 19 minutes

Jeymes Samuel’s feature-film directorial debut “The Harder They Fall,” which premiered on Netflix on Nov. 3 after a limited theatrical release, is a beautifully-filmed Western with an excellent cast and plenty of dramatic shootouts.
​
“The Harder They Fall,” begins with 11-year-old Nat Love eating dinner with his parents when two bad men, one the feared Rufus Buck, played by Idris Elba, bust in and kill Nat’s parents and carve a cross into the young boy’s forehead. The film then picks up 20 years later when Love, now an adult and played by Jonathan Majors, is an Old West outlaw on a mission to kill those involved with the murder of his family. Love has a gang of bandits that includes his love interest Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz), sharpshooter Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi) and quick draw Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler).

If some of these names strike you as familiar it’s because Samuel, who co-wrote the film with Boaz Yakin, took real-life African-American figures from the Old West for his characters (even if they didn’t intertwine in real-life or even live in the same time).

Early in the film Buck is freed from a train carrying him from one place to another by his gang that includes Trudy Smith (Regina King) and Cherokee Bill (Lakeith Stanfield). They return to their former stronghold of Redwood City and Buck effectively takes over control once again.

The cast of this film is absolutely stellar, but one thing that’s noticeable almost immediately from the go is that the gang of villains (Elba, King and Stanfield) are more interesting than the good guys, which isn’t all that unusual for a Western, but in the end you want to root for the good guys and you know more often than not they’re the ones who are going to come out on top. Part of this problem might be that King and Stanfield as such talented and intriguing actors with full fleshed out characters and the film doesn’t spend a whole lot of time building up Pickett or Beckwourth. Honestly, there’s not a ton of character building for anyone in the film, but the film is such a beauty to watch and there’s so much action and so many shootouts, done with bright, gloriously colorized violence that you don’t spend too much time worried about that. You’re entertained and as with many Westerns throughout film history the old good guy versus the bad guy plot is enough to hold your attention.

One fantastic performance in the film is Delroy Lindo as U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, who I’d absolutely love to see a biopic made about. Lindo seems tailor made for the veteran lawman who ends up taking sides with Love, despite the fact he’s been after him for some time. The film also sees memorable performances from Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffie, essentially Mary’s bodyguard, and Deon Cole as Wylie Escoe (such a great Western name), once an ally of Buck who’s run out of Redwood City and eventually turns on his old friend.  

My favorite part of “The Harder They Fall” is the epic final shootout, which takes up a good portion of the film’s second half and is terrifically shot and choreographed.

This is one of the more impressive debut films I’ve ever seen from a director, so I’ll be on the lookout for whatever Samuels does next and based on the film image of “The Harder They Fall” we may be seeing some of the characters who survived the events in the film again in the future.