The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
‘The Kid’ a pretentious, offensive disappointment of a Western
It’s clear that favors were called in for the making of Vincent D’Onofrio’s soapy and overwrought Western “The Kid,” from longtime friend Ethan Hawke starring as storied sheriff Pat Garrett, to D’Onofrio’s “Magnificent Seven” costar Chris Pratt making an appearance as an aggressively bearded villain in easily his worst performance to date. There is no dearth of talent here, including Dane DeHaan as the legendary Billy the Kid. And yet, this pretentious and frankly offensive Western is a total disappointment.
Blame can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Andrew Lanham, in his first feature solo outing. The script is laden with painfully outdated representations and vacillates between snoozeinducing speechifying and bare-bones storytelling that doesn’t elucidate a damn thing — not even the backstory. The 50-year-old classic Westerns feel more nuanced, fresh and complex than the clunky “The Kid.” It’s the kind of Western that feels morally old school, but with a gleefully modern approach to graphic, bloody, digitallyenhanced violence.
“The Kid” refers to the outlaw Billy (DeHaan), ambushed by Garrett to stand trial and pay for his crimes. But it also refers to Rio ( Jake Schur), a young teen on the run with his sister, Sara (Leila George), after he killed his father while he was beating their mother to death. Their murderous uncle Grant (Pratt) has Rio and Sara on the run, so tagging along with a group of criminals and cops on the way to Santa Fe is as safe a ride as they’ll get.
Director D’Onofrio and the stars are do their best with the script — with the exception of Pratt, who is desperately wooden, perhaps as a result of the enormous fake beard that appears to have frozen the lower half of his face. D’Onofrio and cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd get off a few great shots of the gorgeous New Mexico landscape. And there’s a bold sense of style to some of the gunfights, wasted on the utterly flaccid story, which starts, stops, sputters, speaks at length and presupposes.
But for all its structural storytelling issues, the laziest, most offensive part of the film is its treatment of its female characters, who are considered nothing more than helpless abuse victims. Sara is smart and resourceful until she’s kidnapped, raped and pressed into sex work by her uncle, rendering the oncestrong character a quivering mess who doesn’t even think she deserves saving by her younger brother. All the women are abused sex workers aside from the Mexican women who partner with Billy’s gang, waiting futilely for their men’s bodies to be dropped off in a heap at the ranchero gate.
In this coming-of-age tale, a young boy violently takes up arms to protect women. It’s just a shame this Western is too full of its own hot air to bother presenting women as anything more than victims — and ultimately just motivation for men’s action.