The Harder They Fall review – stylish but muddled revisionist western

With The Harder They Fall, debut director Jeymes Samuel has set himself the not inconsiderable challenge of reinventing one of Hollywood’s most well-established genres – the western. After decades of every kind of take on the genre you could imagine, from revisionist to acid to sci-fi, there aren’t many places to go, but Samuel’s choice to populate his Old West with an all-Black ensemble certainly makes it feel fresh, at least for a bit. It isn't long before it starts to get derivative, but this is still a confident and stylish spin on the old mainstays of gunslingers, bandits, and sweaty-palmed showdowns.

For his heroes and villains, Samuel assembles a sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of historical Black cowboys, taking under-discussed legends like Nat Love, Stagecoach Mary, Bass Reeves, and pitting them against each other. Jonathan Majors plays Love, known as “an angel of death,” seeking bloody vengeance on the gang that killed his parents when he was a boy, leaving him with a crucifix-shaped scar on his forehead. This gang is led by the ruthless Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), an ambitious but underhanded outlaw king, ruling his town of Redwood with an iron fist.

It takes quite a while for the promised showdown to arrive, but Samuel fills the time by populating his film with a series of unutterably cool introductions to the various gangs led by Love and Buck, which neatly mirror one another from their female lieutenants to their quickdraw sharpshooters. Majors is tremendous in his biggest leading role to date, ferociously charismatic, yet vulnerable, a powerful combination that lends The Harder They Fall more weight than the script perhaps deserves, especially when it comes to the silly twists that make up its ending.

In support, Elba is suitably regal and imposing, while Regina King and Lakeith Stanfield make for thrilling scene-stealers, full of menace and dark humour, though a couple of the characters feel like they’ve been dropped in from another film entirely, most notably RJ Cyler as clownish young gunslinger Jim Beckworth. This tonal muddle is pretty much a constant throughout, which is sometimes an asset in keeping The Harder They Fall unpredictable, but also generally keeps you at arm's length from really caring about what befalls Love’s gang – especially in a sub-Tarantino final fight that’s not quite as stylish as it thinks it is.

There are some brilliantly slick moments – the title sequence is a gruesome delight, and a visit to a whites only bank that gleams with an alabaster hue is both striking and funny – but Samuels’s visuals are often oddly flat. Both the lighting and colour palette are duller and more uniform than you’d like from a big-budget western, while some bizarre framing choices can interfere with the clarity of the action. With the cast that Samuels has assembled, it would be pretty much impossible for The Harder They Fall to not be a lot of fun, but they’re too often picking up the slack of ambitious yet confused filmmaking.

The Harder They Fall screened as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in cinemas on 22 October and Netflix on 3 November.