The Harder They Fall: Tarantino-style review on Netflix – LargeScreen.com

WESTERN UNCHAINED

Few of them have succeeded in really transforming the western, genre sucked to the core, in recent years. Almost alone Quentin Tarantino managed to make it a new pleasure with its excellent Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. And from the first minutes of The Harder They Fall, we feel to what extent the doubly Oscar-winning filmmaker influenced the young Jeymes Samuel.

Beginning calmly with a small sequence shot, the introductory scene changes with the unexpected arrival of a faceless antagonist. The tension rises between games of glances, hands and off-screen to a surge of violence, plunging the characters into a height of darkness and barbarism. Immediately, the feature film recalls the prologue of Inglourious Basterds and the bloody arrival of Hans Landa in LaPadite’s hut.

A reference among others since The Harder They Fall will regularly evoke the cinema of QT between a bloody start to the title, a hip-hop soundtrack or simply a love of blood and irony. Perhaps the most obvious, however, is the panel before the introduction: “If the facts related in this story are fictitious. These. Characters. Have. Existed”. While Tarantino has mastered the handling of uchronie since 2008, Jeymes Samuel (co-writer of his film with Boaz Yakin) seems to want to follow in his footsteps.

Undoubtedly therefore, The Harder They Fall Sweats the Tarantinesque atmosphere and the spaghetti western more generally. Jeymes Samuel combines the sequences skillfully juggling between tones. Able to go from a serious worrying to a more relaxed atmosphere, even of mixing in the heart of the same scenes a jubilant bloody pleasure with an exacerbated violence, the director impresses.

Regina King in Western Watchmen mode?

NO country for old white

Obviously, by deciding to make a western with only African-American protagonists, in a Wild West where the white characters are absent subscribers and the codes of the genre largely emasculated, Jeymes Samuel will give material to conservative purists to come and argue about a self- saying rampage of the western. However, it is undoubtedly thanks to his daring (it was time for blacks to have the right to the visibility they deserve) that the western is reborn once again, just as horror had found a new lease of life with the Get out by Jordan Peele.

By highlighting forgotten historical figures, but very real (Nat Love, Mary Fields, Bass Reeves, James Beckwourth …), The Harder They Fall completely reinvents the genre to better make fun of its old-fashioned prerequisites. And if he could easily fall into low-end political work, the filmmaker, on the contrary, avoids getting bogged down in it by marking his point with ideas … of cinema.

Idris Elba and his crew are going to send a hell of a pie

This is what makes the charm of The Harder They Fall : his desire and his thirst for cinema. Rarely has a first feature film of a modern western tried so many things. It’s very simple, The Harder They Fall permanently contains cinematographic experiments, whether it be frame games (especially split-screens), duels under tension and ultra-choreographed brawls (a damn crazy climax), fool’s games (the train scene is a great moment of cinema) or simple visual ideas (a dapper photograph), the film is a pleasure of every moment.

We think of a zenithal plan where these characters who were simple shadows now have the right to take all the light to reveal their true personality and face. And inevitably, one thinks especially of this brilliant idea in the last third of the film: a robbery taking place in Maysville, a white city, literally. In addition to offering an explosive sequence where punchlines pour in and shots follow one another, Jeymes Samuel comes to smack the nose enjoyable to the genre to better explode its clichés.

But Jonathan Majors also has a lot of ammunition

And this pop and electric modernization, he also does it through his gallery of fiery characters. First with his male audience, of course, between the vengeful and romantic cowboy Jonathan Majors, the nonchalant Lakeith Stanfield or the charismatic monster Idris Elba, but also through three female protagonists: the fast Danielle Deadwyler, the nervous Zazie Beetz and the badass Regina King. Far from being simple damsels in distress (even if Zazie Beetz suffers a little from this tropism in the middle of the film), they come to explode the screen several times.

Because if the western has often been a men’s affair, that of Jeymes Samuel is also fully a women’s story, black moreover. The result, in the midst of the explosive spectacle of the grand finale, will be a real brutal, bloody and supercharged female confrontation, which has nothing to envy anyone. And even stronger, a transfer of power in a dry mixed game, but symbolically powerful.

An innovative duel

2h16 for NAT

So, unsurprisingly, the feature film is far from perfect, as it is difficult to channel such an appetite and to contain the greed of Jeymes Samuel (especially since he is also the producer of his film). Major cause? A scenario not always optimal, leaving too much room for a few subplots.

I have to say that the tale doesn’t have much original on paper with its revenge story with a capital V, redemption and its love story. And if it keeps twists and turns, all its length (including a splendid one in the final climax, upsetting the perspectives), its execution is very imperfect. The succession of sequences is regularly bastard, when the return of certain characters is too fabricated like the actions of some of them (what about Zazie Beetz, again, delivered to Camp Buck only to advance the story).

Zazie Beetz, battered leader

And above all, the film suffers above all from the almost uninterrupted presence of unbridled music. If one feels this hunger to dust off an old-fashioned genre through contemporary-style songs, including an original piece by Jay-Z himself, they are sometimes far too intrusive. And as the film is a bit long (2:16) and the script is stretched out a bit, the ultra-stylization of the whole is close to excess.

However, Jeymes Samuels saves himself so much the love of cinema so sincere and refreshing that it transmits makes you want to forgive almost everything. So when we know in addition that he dreams of doing The Harder They Fall, the first opus of a trilogy (the last shot leaves little doubt), we say to ourselves that the best is yet to come.

The Harder They Fall is available on Netflix since November 3, 2021 in France