FilmSnobReviews

Title: Jane Got a Gun
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Gavin O’Connor
Starring: Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Joel Edgerton
Runtime: 1 hr 38 mins

What It Is: When Jane Hammond (Portman) must protect her family including her outlaw husband (Noah Emmerich) from a gang that is after them she’ll call on her old lover Dan (Edgerton) in order to keep the peace. This gang is led by Colin McCann (McGregor) who will stop at nothing until Jane’s husband Bill sees the wrong end of his pistol. Luckily for him, Jane’s got a gun and she knows how to use it.   

What We Think: I love a good western as much as the next guy but this is just boring. It adds nothing new to a genre that has seen new life especially in 2015 with the likes of Slow West and Bone Tomahawk which while not financially successful (much the same as this film) those brought something new and interesting to the sometimes tired genre (which this did not). Obviously, whenever one discusses this film you have to talk about the drama that went down during Relativity Media’s bankruptcy and subsequent shelving of most of its projects. This suffered through a change of hands and saw The Weinstein Company dump this thing and quickly forget about it. After seeing this I wish they’d have just cancelled the project instead of wasting my time.

Our Grade: D, By no means, is this film a failure had little to no expectations of being good and it promptly went ahead and was not. I would have loved if this film had been a solid two hours of entertainment was instead an uninteresting story told by flat acting and directed so by the numbers it was way too interchangeable with anything else in the genre. Ths film really relied heavily on the super-talented Portman and its pro-woman Rosey the Riveter “We Can Do It” mentality. This all falls on deaf ears. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it happen? Likewise, if a movie has a pro-woman message and no one goes to see it (2.7 million dollars on a 25 million dollar budget) does it even matter? Don’t see this unless you have insomnia, if so, then by all means see it you ‘ll be cured in no time.