After a predominantly virtual edition in 2020, this year’s London Film Festival finally lands with Jeymes Samuel’s highly anticipated Western on opening night.
★★★★✰
The 65th London Film Festival has begun with a stylishly slick Western aiming for crowd-pleasing entertainment and subversiveness in its genre tropes. Making his directorial feature debut, The Harder They Fall sees Brit-born singer-songwriter Jeymes Samuel (AKA The Bullits) cook up a rip-roaring fable through the open West bursting with raucous energy in its filmmaking and backed by a starry ensemble cast to hand.
The premise is a classic Western setup. Following a brutal opening prologue, we meet outlaw Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) who’s on a personal quest to avenge his parents’ murder at the hands of Rufus Buck’s (Idris Elba) notorious gang. When word spreads that Rufus has broken out of jail thanks to the aid of his close associates Cherokee Bill (Lakeith Stanfield) and ‘Treacherous’ Trudy Smith (Regina King), Nat rounds up his old friends including former love interest Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beets) and unlikely ally Sheriff Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo) to track his arch-nemesis down.
On an aesthetic level, The Harder They Fall has the cinematic grandeur of Classical Hollywood as Mihai Mălaimare Jr’s cinematography takes in sweeping frontier landscapes and glides over ranch settlements. However, it also dons a postmodern sensibility in its storytelling that bears similarities to fellow cine-literates like Quentin Tarantino. From the opening card stating how the story is rooted in fiction ‘but these people existed’ as well as the action-packed gunfights exploding into sensational graphic violence, the film feels pulpy in the manner of a well-worn comic book.
In addition, the music has a key role in the narrative thanks to an original soundtrack produced by Samuel and executive produced by Jay Z entrenched into the story. At times, Samuel’s direction is driven by the soundtrack which predominantly suits the film but also makes certain sequences have the bizarre quality of a music video. In particular when Rufus walks out of his cell and gunfire blazing around him in slow-mo while the bass pounds through your eardrums, you could almost mistaken it for a highly expensive music trailer.
That being said, these idiosyncratic elements would fail without a charismatic ensemble cast and although there are brilliant individual performances like RJ Cyler’s naive Jim Beckwourth and Regina King’s scene-stealing Trudy, it’s important to emphasise that The Harder They Fall is an ensemble piece in of itself. The snappy dialogue from Samuel and Boaz Yakin’s co-written screenplay and the character dynamics within these opposing gangs creates fantastic chemistry between the actors, whether it’s Nat and Mary’s rekindling romance in Jonathan Majors and Zazie Beets or the subtle power shifts between Rufus and Trudy in Idris Elba and King. Each character doesn’t feel underwritten and considering the size of its ensemble, it’s a very impressive feat.
The Harder They Fall is a raucous opening night feature that sets the tone for an exciting festival ahead. Even though the film’s subversive nature eventually gives way to predictable conventions in its barn-storming standoff finale, Samuel has delivered a superb debut that has its own unique flair and rightly offers a space for these historical African American cowboys that have been long forgotten in the past.
The Verdict
Fantastically entertaining, brimming with excitement and refreshing in its subverting of usual Western tropes, The Harder They Fall provides a strong curtain-raiser for another exciting London Film Festival.
Words by Theo Smith
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