Review: Jane Got a Gun

Jane Got a Gun (15)

USA 2015 98 mins  Dir: Gavin O’Connor Starring: Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor, Rodrigo Santoro, Noah Emmerich

The knives were out for this one after it rode into town trailing an especially unpleasant odour. Lynne Ramsey, director of We Need to Talk About Kevin, walked out on the first day of shooting what was to have been her US feature debut. Then Jude Law and Michael Fassbender left the project in sympathy and because of other commitments respectively. Boo for Hollywood, screwing over the Brits again. Disentangle it from all the bad press, however, and you’re left with a perfectly serviceable if unexceptional, mildly feminist revenge western, albeit one with a somewhat clunky structure and contrived pat ending that betrays the meddling of an excess of scriptwriters.

Natalie Portman bags the title role as fierce if improbably glamorous frontierswoman Jane Hammond whose peaceful New Mexico homestead life with her moppet of a daughter is interrupted by the return of hubby John (Emmerich) with a gut full of bullets. While she’s yanking them out and cauterising the wounds, he reveals that the Bishop gang were responsible. Oh, and these varmints are on their way to finish the job. Dumping the nipper with a pal for the rest of the movie, Jane approaches neighbouring drunken gunslinger Dan Frost (Edgerton) for help. He’s more than a little reluctant, not least because he has formed the view that John is a “piece of shit husband”.

Jane and Dan clearly share a past with each other and with gang leader John Bishop (McGregor, barely recognisable beneath his prostheses, slicked-back hair and authentic bad guy moustache), the nature of which is revealed in a series of flashbacks that occasionally stop the action dead in its tracks. Despite a cheeky nod to The Searchers and a familiar plot that occasionally resembles a cut-down Magnificent Seven crossbred with Rio Bravo, adding a spicy dash of Hannie Caulder and McCabe and Mrs Miller for good measure, Jane Got a Gun is hardly in the same league as such recent quality westerns as The Salvation, The Homesman, Slow West, The Revenant, True Grit or The Hateful Eight. But nor is it the total disaster some would have you believe. It’s beautifully filmed by cinematographer Mandy Walker (who shot Baz Luhrmann’s similarly lustrous yet underwhelming Australia) and Gavin O’Connor’s direction of the climactic siege is perfectly competent. As for the performances, Natalie Portman is certainly committed but never seems other than somewhat out of place; Ewan McGregor thoroughly enjoys himself feasting on period scenery; and Joel Edgerton’s soulful, conflicted Civil War veteran anchors the film in something approaching emotional plausibility. You wouldn’t want to saddle up and hit the dusty multiplex trail to catch this one, but it’s worth a look if you find it playing in the corner of the saloon during the piano player’s night off.