Damon Lindelof’s new adaptation of “Watchmen” for HBO shocked viewers by opening with a silent movie sequence about Bass Reeves, a real life legend who was the first black deputy U.S. Marshall in history. In less than two minutes, the show’s director Nicole Kassell created a bit of business so entertaining that viewers unaware of Reeves’ story clamor for a feature length film about his life. Director Wes Miller’s Hell on the Border technically fulfills that desire, but it does less with an hour and a half than the “Watchmen” team did with the length of a commercial.
Another in a long line of underachieving Lionsgate genre exercises, Hell on the Border sure seems like a Bass Reeves movie, starring as it does English actor David Gyasi in the “lead” role. But instead of a rollicking western expanding and expounding upon Reeves’ considerable mythos, the audience must endure an underbudgeted, awkwardly shot and roughly written genre piece that wouldn’t cut the mustard as TV movie. Border is all too proud to walk in the footsteps of other fictional extrapolations of historical black figures, like Chadwick Boseman’s turn as Thurgood Marshall in Marshall, that relegate their leading man to what feels like a supporting role, surrounded by white characters that hog the spotlight.
Reeves was a former slave who became a Marshall at a time where lawmen who were killed by the score and somehow became a prolific and successful officer of the law when the law was still a blunt instrument used to hinder black freedom. Yet here, Gyasi’s Reeves has to share the focus with a white Marshall who uses Reeves to catch big bounties, a white judge who decides to give Reeves a chance after saving his life (and then just continues to get screen time to run home that there were “good” white men back then) and then full-time split the movie with its two more famous cast members.
Ron Perlman gets an oddly expanded role as an outlaw assigned to help Reeves catch Frank Grillo’s villain Dozier. Perlman and Grillo have a history overperforming in supporting roles in genre films, but neither man is given enough to do much more than take up space and look surly. The script is full of convoluted plot developments and ancillary, underwritten bit players to the point that Reeves is just…there. He doesn’t grow or change or get to assert himself or show why he wants to be a lawman. The audience is just supposed to accept him as a fully formed entity when he really just feels like sentient window dressing.
It doesn’t help that the movie is shot on digital video (as most movies today are) but with the awkward look of early ‘00s dramatic reenactment from A&E crime shows. Not once throughout the film do the environs, sets or costuming immerse the viewer in the appropriate period, because the film’s cinematography makes it all feel like a civil war cosplay captured on a cell phone. Bass Reeves deserves a better movie.
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