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GUNSLINGERS

Producers: Randall Batinkoff, Brian Skiba, Laurie Love and Scott Reed   Director: Brian Skiba   Screenplay: Brian Skiba   Cast: Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham, Nicolas Cage, Randall Batinkoff, Cooper Barnes, Tzi Ma, Jeremy Kent Jackson, Costas Mandylor, Scarlet Stallone, William McNamara, Mohamed Karim, Bre Blair, Forrest Wilder, Forrie J. Smith, Laurie Love, Eric Mabius, Dan O’Brien, Mitchell Hoog and Ava Monroe Tadross   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: D–

Even the most devoted lovers of Westerns are advised to skip “Gunslingers,” a corpse-heavy but messy and unconvincing oater in which prolific writer-director Brian Skiba and star Stephen Dorff prove they’re as inept in providing period thrills as they were in fashioning modern ones in the recent “Clear Cut.” The sole modest compensation is yet another wacko performance from Nicolas Cage.

Set in the early twentieth century, the movie begins with a prologue in 1903 New York City (indicated by a cheesy outdoor process shot), where Thomas Keller (Dorff) kills a member of the Rockefeller clan in some unexplained contretemps; his brother Robert (Jeremy Kent Jackson) is set afire in the melee.

Thomas, fearing Rockefeller revenge, apparently leaves Robert behind to escape, for the action shifts to backwoods Kentucky in 1907, where he’s accosted by a bunch of bounty hunters, whom he kills with the same practiced gunplay he exhibited in New York.  Then he rides to a town called Redemption, where Jericho (Costas Mandylor) presides over a congregation of reformed reprobates who frequent a saloon called, for some inexplicable reason, the Domus de Sallust.  After being baptized by Jericho, he joins them, hanging up his guns and going through a compulsory fake hanging that’s documented by town photographer Ben (Nicolas Cage, decked out in a bowler hat and some glasses with square lenses and crucifixes inscribed on them) as his pseudo-grave joins those of the others.

Ben’s the weirdest of the group, of course—as the Bible-obsessed, gun-averse (until he straps on his holster again) fellow, Cage delivers one of his patented loony performances, offering much hand-shaking and delivering his lines in a raspy whisper that makes it hard to understand what he’s saying, which would be annoying if what he was saying were worth hearing. 

The others, despite efforts to be colorful, are dull by comparison.  They include second-in-command Doc (Randall Batinkoff), barkeep Bella (Scarlet Stallone, Sly’s daughter), Levi (Cooper Barnes), Lin (Tzi Ma), Kelly (William McNamara), Hoodoo (Mohamed Karim), Mary (Bre Blair), Hope (Brooklen Wilkes) and Thalia (Laurie Love), distinguishable mostly by the outfits provided by designers Joey Talatou and Misty Rose or their hairdos (cf. Wilkes).

Trouble soon shows up in the person of Valerie Keller (Heather Graham), who arrives with her adorable daughter Grace (Ava Monroe Tadross).  Valerie is wounded and looking for Thomas, and it’s eventually revealed that she’s fleeing her husband Robert, who soon shows up with an eye patch and a posse, actually a small army of gunfighters, intent on capturing his brother, as well as collecting bounties on his protectors. Grace’s paternity, of course, proves to be another reason for his anger.

What follows is a stand-off; think of “Assault on Precinct 13” with sagebrush and spurs.  Some of the Redemption residents, like Thalia, prove turncoats and others, like Hope, simply leave, but most hold on until the last gasp.  A few are strung up for a hanging so protracted—given the effort by friends to hold up the scaffold—that it becomes hilarious.  Over the course of nearly an hour, bullets fly as fast as the terrible dialogue and bodies pile up at an alarming rate. Naturally a final confrontation between the brothers is inevitable.

Performances are weak and stilted down the line, though a few stand out—Cage’s goofy turn, of course, for being amusingly bad, and Jackson’s overwrought, hysterical one for being just conventionally awful.  Dorff makes a drab antihero, and Graham is typically amateurish.  The production design (Elliott Montello) is chintzy and the cinematography (Patrice Lucien Cochet) nondescript, while Skiba makes his clunky direction worse with his lethargic editing, which features lots of pointless, random inserts to slow things down even further.  Richard Patrick adds a bombastic score in a failed effort to energize things.

What this movie actually slings are clichés—or maybe worse.

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DROP

Producers: Jason Blum, Michael Bay, Brad Fuller and Cameron Fuller Director: Christopher Landon   Screenplay: Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach   Cast: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Ed Weeks, Reed Diamond, Gabrielle Ryan Spring, Sarah McCormack, Jeffery Self, Travis Nelson. Michael Shea, Fiona Browne and Ben Pelletier  Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: C+

It’s surprising how long director Christopher Landon is able to sustain the goofy premise Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach have contrived for “Drop,” a smartphone-based thriller set mainly in a ritzy observation-deck-restaurant with a magnificent view of the nighttime Chicago skyline (although, to be honest, it doesn’t look much like the Windy City).  That’s where Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widowed single mom, meets Henry (Brandon Sklenar) for what both hope will be a pleasant first date, arranged, of course, online.

It turns out to be anything but.

After a prologue showing Violet, beaten and bruised, being threatened, along with her toddler son, by her abusive, now deceased husband (Michael Shea), Violet appears sometime later dressed to the nines for her first date in a long while.  Leaving young son Toby (Jacob Robinson), no longer a toddler, in the care of her vibrant younger sister Jen (Violett Beane), she drives off to PaLate, the sumptuous restaurant where she’s to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar).  Since he texts that he’s running a bit late, she informs the hostess (Sarah McCormack) that she’ll wait at the bar.

There she’s greeted by Cara (Gabrielle Ryan Spring), the pleasant bartender, and encounters Richard (Reed Diamond), an older man nervously waiting for his blind date Diane (Fiona Browne), and Phil (Ed Weeks), the boozy pianist who makes a clumsy pass.  Finally Henry arrives and they’re shown to a table where they’re tended to by chatty, overly solicitous waiter Matt (Jeffery Self).  Henry proves to be a nice, personable, attentive guy, a photographer by trade, with even the mayor as a client.

But by then Violet’s more than a little unnerved.  Someone’s begun sending “drops” to her phone—photos and messages on the app that’s operative only within a small radius, indicating that they must be coming from within the restaurant.  At first they’re just annoying, but they quickly become menacing, telling her she’ll have to kill Henry or else the masked intruder (Bill Pelletier) who’s broken into her apartment—and whose movements she can watch via the security cameras available on her phone—will kill Toby.  Henry is as accommodating as can be about Violet’s increasingly fraught attitude and actions, but it’s clear she’s becoming unraveled as she faces a terrible dilemma.  And she can’t warn Henry, call the police, or escape the gaze of her tormentor.

Who is it?  There are plenty of suspects, or, if you prefer, red herrings on the menu.  Could it be Richard, who’s nursing his drinks alone after Diane storms out?  Or the obnoxious Phil, who has eyes for her?  Or Connor (Travis Nelson), the handsome guy who keeps fiddling with his phone while waiting for somebody to join him for dinner?  It could even be the excessively friendly Cora, or put-upon Matt, or even the icily competent hostess.  Or one of the other anonymous diners, some getting spotlight treatment from Landon and cinematographer Marc Spicer, who gives the gorgeous room production designer Susie Cullen has fashioned and Gwen Jeffares-Hourie’s lovely costumes a lustrous sheen.  And why does the evil genius want Henry dead anyway?

All is revealed in a big melee that leaves one person stabbed, another shot, a third fallen from the restaurant to the street below, a fourth dangling from the roof clutching a tablecloth, and numerous others hiding under tables or fleeing in horror.

All of this is preposterous, of course, but Landon, Spicer, editor Ben Baudhuin and composer Bear McCreary conspire to make the implausibility more enjoyable than it has any right to be; some of the twists are so goofy they’ll make you blanch, but Landon and his team hold things together even at the most absurd moments.

They’re helped immeasurably by their cast.  Sklenar makes a most sympathetic potential victim, and all the supporting cast are enthusiastically committed to putting the nonsense across, with comic-relief Self especially so.  But it’s Fahy who’s the key.  She’s hardly subtle, but grabs audience attention early on and holds it throughout. 

It’s after the wacky restaurant climax that things go off the rails.  Violet must speed home to save her sister and child, and her freewheeling dash through traffic as the intruder tries to do his dastardly worst strains credulity past the breaking point.  There follows her brutal face-off with him.  Even though the sequence ends with a cheeky paean to a child’s inventiveness, overall it’s nastily explicit, unlike the earlier hour of the picture, which had a genteel tone despite the gnawing tension.  It makes for a “Drop” downer that a light-hearted coda can’t dispel.

We’re left with an intimate thriller that manages to please for the first two acts despite the plot’s ridiculousness, but stumbles badly in grasping for a mean-spirited, tonally off finale.                      

If it doesn’t end up a fully satisfying thriller, though, “Drop” does serve as a salutary warning against having a smartphone.  You might argue that had she not had one, Violet could not have kept tabs on Toby and rescued him.  But of course if she didn’t have it, the plotters could never have chosen her as the instrument for their scheme, and Toby would never have been in danger.  Moreover, she never would have become an obnoxiously overprotective helicopter mom obsessively watching over a kid whose cleverness she underestimated.

One other point.  At the press screening, there was a woman in a front row who, despite pleas before the film began, was turning her phone on and off repeatedly for the first fifteen minutes or so.  Banning the devices from theatres entirely would solve another problem, one not as menacing as that Violet faced, but irritating nonetheless.

Alas, it seems that it’s too late to do anything about the all-conquering smartphone, in either reel or real life.