The Harder They Fall (2021)

An interesting, very modern-feeling Western. It’s set in an “alternate” west that seems to consist of parallel, almost completely segregated white and black towns (and mainly set in the “black west”). In fairness, the west shown in films is largely fictional anyway and I don’t have a great knowledge of how and where black Americans lived in the old west, so for the sake of this film I’m happy to take this setting at face value. The plot concerns Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), who is shown as a child in the introduction watching Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) gun down his parents. Unsurprisingly this sets up a revenge quest.

In terms of tone, it’s a fairly violent, quick-paced action film. It largely doesn’t take itself too seriously (there’s a nice visual joke about the white town, for example) and definitely isn’t pretending to be a great work of art.

The plot seemed to me slightly meandering as we see Love reform his old gang, and Buck get released on his way to prison and then take over and extort a town. However, there was a nice twist at the end which was unexpected (at least to me) but which I felt added to the film rather than just being a “surprise”. The characters were largely interesting characters and well-acted – just slightly let down by a plot that doesn’t quite seem to flow naturally. The characters were very loosely based on real historical characters (with the emphasis on “very loosely”). Given that it was largely fiction I wasn’t sure that this added much.

I think this was released directly to Netflix and it’s well worth watching there. Enjoyable and brings something different to the genre without being an absolute classic.