A wounded man wakes up in a household where his gun has no standing. That is still an arresting setup for a Western. Julio Quintana’s remake of the 1947 Angel and the Badman gives Zachary Levi the role John Wayne once played, the outlaw Quirt Evans, and asks him to spend an unusual amount of the movie being looked after. For someone whose reputation depends on never owing anyone a thing, a bed and a few days of care are a disorienting proposition. The western landscape promises that he can always ride away. The people under this roof give him a reason to imagine staying.
The opening attaches that choice to stolen Confederate gold and to Laredo, played by Neal McDonough. The gold makes the business between the men easy to follow. It gives Quirt an immediate motive for getting back in the saddle and Laredo a reason to remain in pursuit. The price of that clarity is that the audience can settle the moral account early. A more interesting question hangs over the ranch. What does a man who makes a living by anticipating betrayal do when people can see his condition perfectly well and help him anyway?
Levi has a more contemporary physical and vocal presence than Wayne, which gives his Quirt room to seem unsettled by the attention. Wayne’s assurance made the original’s curtailment of his authority part of the pleasure. Levi can bring the assurance and the uncertainty closer together. The danger is that the change of heart starts to seem like a disposition he has been concealing all along. The film has to leave room for him to enjoy having the advantage in a room if the renunciation of that advantage is to carry weight. A little more unexamined pleasure in Quirt’s old life would have given the new one a steeper price.
The romance works best when it is about proximity. A rancher’s daughter can come to know Quirt through the time it takes him to recover, and he can see her take on the unglamorous obligations that a household requires. The basic decency of those exchanges is appealing. The idea grows thinner whenever her conviction becomes an instrument for measuring his progress. The Quaker premise has more sting when its discipline is allowed to make her life difficult too. A love story about whether two people can share a principle needs to show how differently they came by it.
Meg Fraser’s Penny is in an interesting position as the one who spends time with Quirt without the benefit of his reputation. What she can observe is a person temporarily dependent on other people for things he would ordinarily do himself. Fraser has to allow some curiosity into that care. If Penny only sees the goodness she hopes to encourage, the relationship becomes a mechanism of conversion. If she can be curious about the dangerous part of him too, the period when he is still injured has a value beyond setting up a choice he will be able to make on horseback.
The production has an eye for the proportions of a Western. Wide country can make one rider look momentarily free and make the same rider look dangerously exposed. The furnished interiors offer a more useful measure of what violence might interrupt than the stolen gold ever can. Yet the contrast is so clean that it can feel predetermined. McDonough’s Laredo carries most of the pressure of the outside world. A longer look at people whose livelihoods rely on Quirt’s kind of order would make the alternatives feel less neatly distributed between the good house and the bad men approaching it.
Tommy Lee Jones’s presence as Marshal McClintock is a reminder of how much mileage a Western can get from somebody simply having been around a long time. A marshal can know where Quirt has been without sharing Laredo’s interest in seeing him stay that person. That alternative source of knowledge gives the film a chance to separate what mercy offers from what the law can actually promise. The tension between the two is worth more attention than the screenplay gives it. A man may have changed by the time he has to answer for what he did. It is entirely possible for both claims on him to be just.
The film retains a genuine interest in what mercy costs a community. Taking in Quirt invites the consequences of decisions the family had no part in making. Any account of their generosity that stops at the uplift misses the risk implicit in opening the door. Quintana’s Western finds its best argument there, in the time between tending the wound and finding out who put it there. Once the story has to collect on the gold and the pursuit, that fragile arrangement gives way to a familiar settling of scores.
