Jane Got a Gun review

Over the last couple of years the troubled production history of “Jane Got a Gun” has been well publicized. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” director Lynn Ramsey was originally attached to direct, but left the project—or was fired, depending on who you ask—and Gavin O’Connor of “Warrior” and “Pride and Glory” fame was sent in to quickly salvage the production. Talks of hasty rewrites were buzzed in the media and the final result is a trim western with very little personality. And to be quite honest, given the circumstances, that’s actually something of an accomplishment.

Natalie Portman plays Jane, a frontiers woman who finds out that she’s being hunted down by a gang of outlaws after her husband, played by Noah Emmerich, is near-fatally injured and wanders back to their secluded home with a bullet in belly. Jane is then put in the awkward position of asking her ex-lover, played by Joel Egerton, to protect her and dying husband.  As you might expect, tough conversations are shared between the three as they set up nineteenth century home-alone traps around Jane’s property.

Leave it to Gavin O’Conner to turn a story about woman trying to protect her family into a story about competing masculinity. Portman help produce this picture for herself to star in, and the buzz about its feminist themes were supposed to be part of the project’s original appeal. Somewhere in the production process Portman’s Jane became a walking MacGuffin and a hapless damsel, defined only by the men fighting to protect her and the men out to denigrate and destroy her. Jane eventually does get the titular gun, these brief moments of empowerment are buried in a heap on down-home, country-fried mansplaning.

If we choose not to think about the thematic betrayal or its problematic sexual politics, Jane functions just well-enough as a dusty B-movie western. The flashback narrative is herky-jerky and the pacing is suffers because of it, but it’s made clear early-on who the bad guys are—Ewan McGregor with a rubber nose, looking not unlike a young James Garner—and it’s clear what the ultimate payoff of the film should be. As far as how said pay-off is played out, it could have come a little sooner and been explored with more cinematic breadth and depth than O’Conner allows within this truncated edit.

There should be an inherent drama in the “Rio Bravo”/“Assault on Precinct 13” set-up in which a protagonist stands their ground and prepares for an all-out assault by a group of heavily armed bandits. The way in which “Jane Got a Gun” decides to tell this story lacks in both the exploitation glee of something like Tarantino’s talky winter-western “The Hateful Eight” or the slow-burning cinematic majesty of Alejandro Inarritu’s exhausting revenge film “The Revenant.” There’s also much less grandiose over-direction than indulged by either of those directors and while this ephemeral disappointment lacks visual ambition and a specific vision, there’s something to be said about the refreshing honesty of this its humble mediocrity.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Jane Got a Gun" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.