Clint's son makes the jump to westerns. The Movie Sleuth posts an early review.
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| Too bad I'll never be as cool as my dad.... talking to chairs. |
I was real
excited when this movie came across my desk.
Like, most of you, I absolutely adore Clint Eastwood, especially every
damn western he starred in.
So
naturally, when a western starring Clint Eastwood’s son Scott Eastwood fell in
my lap, I was more than happy to dig in here. Diablo is
a contemporary western film with what you would expect; stunning scenic shots,
a gritty texture, and several plot threads racing to a cataclysmic endpoint,
except it was missing a gritty texture, and several plot threads racing to a
cataclysmic endpoint. Diablo, missing
that lovely sun-drenched dusty, dirty feel, contains really only one thread of
story through its 83 minute running time.
I watched it twice just make sure I wasn’t going crazy though.
Digging
deeper into the meaning of what was presented here, I realized that, while
there are not several autonomous plot threads running together, there are
several story threads interwoven into the fabric of the character named Jackson played by Scott Eastwood. With that
said, there is a lot that is not explained in the course of this film as Jackson moves on down the trail, and I am hoping this was done on
purpose. It left miles of room for some
creative speculation into the complexity of Jackson and who he really was in
the context of this story.
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| I'm your Huckleberry. |
I began to
see that Diablo is not just about one story put in front of us, but a story
about good and evil. Jackson, of
course, is at the middle of this story and there are several cues in the film
that made me think that Jackson is not a man, but something else. Jackson weaves between good and evil and so
do his rivals. You really are left
wondering who the real bad guys are even at the end of the film. Then there
is the character of Ezra played by Walton Goggins. This is the character in this film that
really made me question the simplicity of the plot in the first place. There are a lot of lines this character says
that had my suspicions of who this character really is also.
“Death might
be a favor to you.”
“Well, what
can I say, I’ve become attached.”
If you watch
the film and see these lines put in their proper context, it makes you wonder
if there was a darker, deeper story written into the fabric of this simple
western film, or I am just way over-thinking this?
Score
-Scott Lambert