The Old Way

Not even Nicolas Cage with a ridiculous mustache (for far too short a time) can save this movie. The Old Way is a bad film, not funny bad, not disturbingly bad, not uproariously bad, but mediocre in every single aspect. Cage stars as a former gunslinger long retired whose own family is targeted by the someone (Noah Le Gros) directly affected by his past actions. With his wife (Kerry Knuppe) dead, Colton Briggs (Cage) takes his equally autistic daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) after the men in a quest for revenge in this underwhelming tale.

The Old Way is a slog. The film lacks the look and style to sell itself as a western. Despite two separate revenge stories, neither being all that convincing as Le Gros seems more crazy and Cage is too bottled up emotionally, that concept fizzles out quickly as well. The Unforgiven-esque evil cowboy pulled out of retirement also fails to impress as despite what some characters say about Colton Briggs in passing, we don't enough to sell him as Old West John Wick.

The only piece of the movie of interest is the father-daughter dynamic between Cage and Armstrong. Had a better writer centered the story around that relationship, you can see the possibility of what The Old Way may have become. Armstrong steals the film in its most believable performance for a role that calls for her to be mildly confused more than anything else over the course of the 95-minute run-time.

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• Title: The Old Way
• IMDb: link