Writer-director Brian Skiba’s Gunslingers is the filmmaker’s second western to reach theaters this year, following Guns of Redemption just last month, and it feels no less hastily assembled. While the cast of Stephen Dorff, Nicolas Cage, and Heather Graham alone is an upgrade over that of the earlier film’s (sorry, Casper Van Dien and Sean Astin), there’s little else to keep Gunslingers from blurring together with Guns of Redemption, or any other modern western of its ilk that was always destined to disappear into the limbo of VOD.
Thomas Keller (Dorff) is a wanted man on the run in the Kentucky wilderness. Looking to put his violent past behind him, he arrives at the town of Redemption, which, as its name bluntly suggests, is a haven for outlaws wanting to start their lives over. With the help of the town’s reformed criminal populace, Thomas fakes his own capture and execution, in order to re-emerge under a new identity and live among them. Naturally, this newfound tranquility doesn’t last long, as a parade of bounty hunters on his trail soon ride into town, led by Thomas’s crazed brother, Robert (Jeremy Kent Jackson), who’s under the mistaken assumption that Thomas left him for dead during the skirmish in New York City that sent him on the run.
Gunslingers opens in the Big Apple—or, rather, a cheap hotel room set introduced with a “New York City” title card—where Skiba immediately indulges his penchant for stylized violence. The sort of flair that marks the scene’s close-quarters gunfight has allowed Skiba, especially with 2023’s vivid and lively Dorff-starring Dead Man’s Hand, to distinguish himself from other filmmakers working primarily in the DTV market. But once the action shifts to the frontier setting, whatever distinctive directorial touch marks the film is swapped out for a punishingly dull aesthetic of haphazard, washed-out compositions capturing patchily constructed Old West locales that look suspiciously recycled from the ones in Guns of Redemption.
The narrative is similarly shopworn, with Gunslingers proceeding as a routine siege flick for the majority of its runtime as Redemption’s residents hole up in the town saloon and sporadically exchange bullets with the bad guys. Through it all, it’s all but impossible for the ostensibly colorful city denizens of the town—including Thomas’s former lover Val (Graham), tough-talking mayor Jericho (Costas Mandylor), and sage Chinese migrant Lin (Tzi Ma)—to make much of an impression given the banal dialogue with which they have been saddled.
Except, that is, for Cage as the enigmatic Ben, a Jesus-worshipping weirdo with an apparently legendary history of gunslinging. Cage, intoning his lines in a hilariously gravelly rasp while decked out in a bowler hat and funky cross-shaped sunglasses, is clearly having a good time goofing around in the sidelines of the proceedings, but his character is so ancillary to the plot that he’s only barely able to bring Skiba’s painfully anonymous oater to life.
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