Review: Cowboy Smoke

Cowboy Smoke

OPENING: 07/30/2008

STUDIO: Bandwagon Films

TRAILER: Trailer

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
The Western isn’t dead. It’s waiting for the smoke to clear.

Opening Statement
When independent filmmakers venture into genre territory the result is usually a horror flick. Hollywood studios rarely make Westerns these days, let alone the self-financing crowd, so when the opportunity came to check out a screener copy of Will Moore’s Cowboy Smoke (a movie whose title I’d heard from festival circuit press releases and such), I couldn’t pass it up.

Exhibited at this year’s Action on Film International Film Festival and Austin Film Festival, Cowboy Smoke is Will Moore’s third feature and a sequel of sorts to his first, Wesley Cash.

Facts of the Case
Fired from his job at a convenience store because his love of a quick-draw video game called “Cowboy Smoke” gets in the way of his work, Joe (Mike Lutz, The Faculty) heads for south Texas to find a job as a cowboy. He can’t rope or ride but is hired as a gun by a rancher who wants him to kill illegals sneaking across the border. When Joe passes on the morally repugnant job, he finds himself on the wrong side of the area’s powerful land owners as well as the law. He winds up in the custody of Travis (Matthew T. Johnson, Friday Night Lights), an inept Texas Ranger on the hunt for a fugitive named Wesley Cash (Chad Mathews, Get Your Stuff).

Travis’ hunt takes him to the ranch of a well-connected coyote posing as a cattle rancher and his sleazy, psychopathic son Indio (James Paul, Read On). Because of his quick-draw skills and naïveté, the villainous local ranchers make Joe sheriff after Indio murders the previous man to hold the job. Joe tries to use his new position to protect illegals, his compassion for them fuelled by a budding romance with a pretty Mexican waitress (Estella Perez, The Bong Connection). Travis refuses to stick his neck out to stop the local thugs, but Joe finds an unlikely ally in Wesley Cash after the outlaw witnesses the inhuman horrors of Indio’s coyote business.

The Evidence
Whether it’s John Wayne making a stand against an arrogant and murderous family of ranchers in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, or Clint Eastwood protecting a town caught in a turf war between rival gangs in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, social justice has always been a major theme of Westerns. Sheriffs, gunslingers, and Texas Rangers are forever protecting salt-of-the-earth townsfolk from the abuses of greedy cattlemen, oil barons, railroad executives, mining company bigwigs, and other soulless rapscallions. In crafting Cowboy Smoke – a modern-day Western with healthy doses of homage paid to the previously mentioned filmmakers (especially Leone) — indie writer-director Will Moore dives neck-deep into the theme of social injustice by building his plot around the politics and ugly realities of illegal immigration. Specifically, Moore uses a true life tragedy in which over 20 Mexican immigrants (some of them young children) were found suffocated in the back of a truck in Victoria, Texas as a springboard for his action. 

From the rotoscoped opening credits sequence — a direct lift from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More — it’s apparent that Moore loves the Western. But the pleasant surprise at the heart of Cowboy Smoke is Moore’s fine-tuned grasp of the genre’s themes and rhythms. Despite the director’s humble bow to Leone in the movie’s opening minutes, Cowboy Smoke isn’t a hackneyed pastiche. The conflict between cattlemen and coyotes, and the way Joe and Wes play both evil sides against one another, evokes the convoluted plot of A Fistful of Dollars but the picture isn’t a remake. It is its own beast, drawing from the Western’s most resonant motifs in order to add depth and texture to its own story.

Generally speaking, brevity is the soul of a good action picture, but Cowboy Smokeis a bit too short for its labyrinthine story. What Joe and Wes witness on the inside of the cattle ranch and coyote businesses is eye-opening, but much of it feels undercooked. This is particularly true when Indio gives Wes a guided tour of his father’s business, a scene that leads to a direct reference to the Victoria tragedy. The sequence that Moore delivers is fairly compelling, but could have been moreso. Joe and Wes are likeable action heroes but I came away wishing that at least a few of the nameless immigrants who suffered Indio’s cruelty weren’t nameless. More time deep inside the coyote operation might have lent Cowboy Smokehealthier doses of action, suspense, and pathos. Moore’s failure (or, more likely, inability due to the constraints of small-budget filmmaking) to dig as deeply as he could have into the characters’ morally vexing experiences is especially bothersome in light of his squandering precious minutes on a comic introduction of Joe that doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the movie, a romantic subplot that is predictable and unsatisfying, and two bizarre action set pieces in which one character fires shots at another while the two are engaged in a footrace in the wide open.

Closing Statement
One doesn’t come across many indie Westerns. Though a little rough around the edges, Cowboy Smoke is an impressive showcase for Will Moore’s writing and direction. Somebody give that man a budget.

The Verdict
7/10

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