Director: Jacques Audiard
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 1.0
Two brothers, Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) - who have the last name of Sisters (how ... novel) and work as assassins in the Ol' West (how ... original) - are assigned a job by their boss (Rutger Hauer) to take out a guy named Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) who's discovered a new way of panning for gold (with chemicals!). Audiard's filmography has some pretty damn intense pictures in there - Dheepan, A Prophet, etc. - but there's something uncharacteristically muted about this, his first in English: Reilly, Phoenix and Jake Gyllenhaal, all of them typically dynamic performers, fail to make much of an impression (even the 'fights' between Reilly and Phoenix feel scripted) and the story (based on the book by Patrick DeWitt) is glacial-paced, with one particularly dumb moment at the end when Charlie dumps a cannister of toxic material into the water and it kills two people (it's almost tempting to laugh at it). It almost seems, at points, to want to turn into outright comedy, but lacks the imagination or motivation to follow through.
