Producers: Aleksi Hyvärinen, Joey Palmroos and Austen Paul Directors: Joey Palmroos and Austen Paul Screenplay: Joey Palmroos, Austen Paul and Anders Holmes Cast: Eric Roberts, Dallas Hart, Arthur Sylense, Jonathan Peacy, Celeste Wall, Sterling Scott, Liam Collins, Jeremiah Crosby and Mason Greer Distributor: Saban Films
Grade: D
Even the most devoted fan of westerns will have a hard time sitting through “The Outlaws” (called “5 Outlaws” in the opening credits), an amateurish tale of train robbers squabbling over their loot. The nearly action-free talk-fest will have you squirming in your recliner and reaching for the remote long before its brief running-time expires.
The movie begins with a prologue set in 1852, showing an evil drifter killing a settler, his wife, and—apparently—their two children. It then skips ahead thirty years, as a droning narrator tells us, to reveal a gang of outlaws—“Wild Bill” Higgins (Arthur Sylense), JT, or Tulsa (Dallas Hart) and Boone (Jonathan Peacy)—obstructing a railroad track to stop a train and relieve it of a cache of cash. When a pompous, loquacious marshal on the coach (Liam Collins) tells the passengers not to worry, he’s dispatched by the fourth member of the gang, Henrietta Parker (Celeste Wall), who boarded the train at the last station, and her cohorts kill the other lawmen guarding the safe. “Fast Fingers” Boone then unlocks the safe and the four ride off with the loot.
Cut to the forest where they’re hiding out from the law. Higgins wakes in the morning from a drunken sleep to discover that the coins in the saddlebag have been replaced with rocks. After a bunch of flashbacks offering some backstory for each of the crooks, Higgins threatens his three confederates in an attempt to discover which of them stole the money, but his effort is interrupted by his older brother Bloody Tom (Eric Roberts), the mastermind behind the heist, who’s intent on recovering the cash for himself. There follows a series of clumsy twists with a final revelation hearkening back to that prologue.
Most of the film consists of Sylense, Hart, Peacy and Wall shouting at one another in bad accents that only reinforce the dialogue’s period affectations. Of the four Peacy stands out, not because he gives a good performance (in fact, it’s terrible), but because his scraggly, limping, duplicitous character at least possesses some comic individuality. Hart and Sylense are simply dull, while Wall’s hard-bitten persona isn’t much better. Roberts arrives late to the party, and pretty much sleepwalks through the final reel (the movie is actually divided into chapters). A bit of rather grotesque energy is infused into the picture by Collins as the stupidly preening marshal and Sterling Scott as a preacher with a moral message to convey during one of the flashbacks (he returns perfunctorily at the end); both are instructed to chew the scenery enthusiastically, the former apparently to provoke laughs that do not come.
“The Outlaws” is a labor of unrequited love for Joey Palmroos and Austen Paul, who co-directed and co-shot it, co-wrote it (with Anders Holmes), co-produced it (with Aleksi Hyvärinen) and are also credited with the production and costume design. They left the editing to Toni Tikkanen, who makes the fragmented scenario work as smoothly as possible while allowing for some useful inserts, and the score to Tuomas Kantelinen, whose music is unexceptional; the closing song is irritating.
But this threadbare effort does none of them much credit, except for perseverance. By any title, it’s just another sadly third-rate little oater.