Legends of Western Cinema Week 2025 | The Harder They Fall {2021}

{The Plot}

As a child, Nat Love watched notorious outlaw Rufus Buck murder his parents at their breakfast table.  Rufus spared Nat's life but carved the shape of a cross into his forehead.  Years later, Rufus is imprisoned in Yuma and Nat, knowing that he can no longer exact vengeance on Rufus himself, roams the West as a vigilante, trying to content himself with killing as many members of Rufus' gang as he can.  But when Nat learns that Rufus has escaped, and that some of Nat's own partners have unwittingly robbed a coach carrying the fugitive's money, he must scramble to reunite his scattered crew and prepare for a final confrontation with Rufus.

NOTE:  Several of the main characters in the film are based on historical figures — e.g., Bass Reeves — but the director has been clear that this is, and is intended to be, a fictionalization of history.  In real life, most of these people didn't know each other and led very different lives than their movie counterparts.

{My Thoughts}

The short version:  If you like your Westerns newer, grittier, and more stylized (but self-aware), then you'll probably like The Harder They Fall.  If you don't like them that way, you probably won't.  I like them that way, so I did.

The long version:  This story isn't a terribly unique one at its core, but director Jeymes Samuel manages to take a run-of-the-mill plotline and fashion it into a deliciously fresh and rewarding adventure.  The cinematography is the perfect blend of style and substance, combining sleek and sizzling editing with wide, quiet shots of the American West that allow the landscape to speak for itself.  The acting brings the characters to life with loud, theatrical passion (where appropriate) and with admirable restraint (where appropriate).  The soundtrack is outstanding, a blend of hip hop, reggae, and balladry in the lyrical tracks, and soaring, epic orchestration in the score.  (You can click here to watch a good example of how this movie incorporates music into its storytelling.)  And that choir at the end?  "Ugh, chills.  Literal chills."  Samuel — in addition to directing, producing, and co-writing the film itself — crafted the entire soundtrack, both score and songs, which is absolutely remarkable.  If this is what he can produce as a feature film debut, imagine what he'll do if he pursues more directorial work in the future.  Insanely talented man.

Before going any further, it probably behooves me to take a brief moment for content concerns.  These can be best addressed by looking up the Kids-in-Mind rating and review of this film, but here's my bullet-point overview:

• There is some brief sensuality/sexuality, but honestly not very much.  (The most extended sequence is a woman dancing in a bar who seems to be naked but covered head to toe in dark blue paint and strategically placed gold-leaf embellishments.  From what I remember, the dance isn't very sexual and views more as a contemporary/expressionistic routine.)

• There is a lot of profanity, about as much as or maybe a little more than you would expect from any other modern-made Western.  

• Same with the violence:  there's a lot of it.  I honestly didn't find any of it that excessive, except one kill toward the beginning that features multiple sensationalized mini-explosions of gore.  Speaking of which, the movie contains a decent bit of blood, with lots of sprays and spurts and point-blank headshots — but most of these happen in the middle distance, not up close and personal.  That said, there is some foreground gore, so use your own discretion.  (Again, consult Kids-in-Mind.  Blood/gore, in and of itself, isn't necessarily one of my visual sensitivities, so it's tricky for me to gauge it for other viewers.)

Back to the show itself:

I really like the way the title plays into the film.  It's a fun, almost tongue-in-cheek way of breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging the audience by borrowing an aphorism everyone knows, but it's also very thematically apt for the story.  

The bigger they come, the harder they fall.  

Rufus is a legend — he even quotes Napoleon in describing himself:  "I am driven towards an end that I do not know.  As I reach it, as I shall become unnecessary, an atom shall suffice to shatter me.  Until then, all forces of humankind can do nothing to stop me."  At the end of the day, though, Rufus is just as vulnerable as the next man.  I could name probably a half-dozen moments throughout the film when he could easily have been killed without even seeing it coming, and when he only survived because of the story's (perfectly correct) desire to maintain dramatic effect.  

Cherokee Bill is a legend — pulling all those sad world-weary expressions on his sad beautiful face (dang it, Lakeith) as if it's a burden to be "the fastest" gun in the West, as if he's forced to kill all of his victims but doEsn'T rEaLly WaNNa.  *SPOILERS*  But even a giant may eventually meet a taller giant, and that's just what happens to Cherokee Bill when he runs afoul of a faster draw (a female faster draw, might we add 😉).

Nat is a legend — writing a name for himself in the (admittedly criminal) blood of his enemies.  Yet ultimately, and most subtly, though he's technically the "victor," he is also taken down.  *BIGGER SPOILERS*  Nat has built his fanaticism for revenge into a monolith that can block out the sun of anything more important in his life — and, eventually, he is able to "satisfy" that fanaticism.  He does kill Rufus.  But the circumstances of Rufus' transgressions against Nat, the crimes for which Nat has hated Rufus all these years, render the killing ultimately anticlimactic and unsatisfactory.  Rufus was still wrong, but the situation was less clear-cut, less black and white, than Nat imagined all those years, and now he has to reckon with the fact that his father was not the man he thought he was, and that he was killed by the half-brother whom Nat never knew he had, and whom Nat himself has just killed in an almost impulsive, confused, tearful decision.  

*STILL SPOILERS*  Speaking of which, a quick detour:  I assumed from the beginning that there was some familial relationship between Rufus and Nat's parents — though I was originally guessing that perhaps the mother had been Rufus's wife or girlfriend originally and that Rufus may have been Nat's biological father — but even though I was expecting it, I did find myself feeling that the Big Reveal in the final confrontation between Nat and Rufus was beginning to wax a bit melodramatic.  Maybe that's just me, but it was one of the only places where the somewhat derivative nature of the story began to wear on me.  

Also, Rufus' whole woe-is-me-for-I-am-a-tortured-soul-who's-just-misunderstood attitude irritated me vaguely throughout the movie, but it was really on display in that last scene and, though I perhaps should have given the circumstances, I didn't have much patience for it.  "I couldn't kill my brother" — like, OK??  But you could murder his (completely innocent!!) mother in front of him and then carve the shape of a cross into his forehead with a razor??  Babe, you aren't special and you aren't absolved.  Get out of here with that nonsense.  *END OF SPOILERS*

The show is larger-than-life, but there seems to be an undercurrent running through it that acknowledges that, ultimately, however big and tough and flashy any of these characters are, all of them will eventually come to nothing.  Sooner or later every last one of them will die, one way or another, and their memories will fade, even if they are not entirely forgotten, and at the end of the day, the mesas of the West will continue to stand under the glare of the Western sun, and the prairie dust will continue to blow over their nondescript graves.

The bigger they come, the harder they fall.  

Pretty juicy stuff, in my personal opinion. 

⸻

P.S.  Speaking of endings, they are kind of iconic for that very last frame, not gonna lie!!  (*SPOILERS* Although it's also irritating from a technical perspective because in what world would Mary not have made absolutely sure that Trudy was dead in the barn?? *END OF SPOILERS)  I've read that the director hopes to make a trilogy, with a prequel and a sequel yet to release.  I'm personally more interested in the sequel than the prequel, but we shall see.

P.P.S.  Nat and Mary are cute enough, I guess, but tbqh?  I was actually shipping Nat and Cuffee more.  (Speaking of which:  Cuffee, you will always be famous.  Cuffee, you are so very loved.  Cuffee, you are an icon.)

Have you watched The Harder They Fall?

What did you think of it?