Horizon: An American Saga — Part One (2024)

Watched 6/27/24 (theater)

Horizon: An American Saga — Part One is the long-winded name of this year’s one big Western movie. A dime a dozen back in the days that this one’s craftsmanship strives to emulate, pictures like these are becoming more and more rare. They’ve been on life support for a decade plus now. Part One is the first of four planned parts of a Yellowstone-adjacent pet project by Red America’s sweetheart, Kevin Costner. And he fuels it with all of his interests: A mostly ugly digital West that from frame one exclaims that they picked the wrong camera, cringe-core dialogue, lackluster shootouts, lazy directing, younger attractive women (and vanity as a by-product), boring old men, and a complete lack of creative or competent vision overall.

Make no mistake. Horizon is the blowhard mega-Western that it was advertised as. But it is so much more eye-roll inducing than one could possibly imagine. Many of the cast members deliver their lines in the register of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room to the point where I couldn’t help but snicker. The action set pieces are shot and cut together in such a frustratingly unkempt, unprofessional manner that it actively made me grit my teeth. The interactions are so simultaneously overwritten and obvious that it often feels as if Horizon is a middle school play that got way overfunded and intermittently rewritten by someone’s rich uncle.

That rich uncle is the aforementioned Kevin Costner. And to his credit; he’s one of the more believable deliverers of human interactions in the movie, despite some ridiculously overemphasized action beats that just come off as embarrassingly ego-centric. Costner does the stoic rogue bit well enough, but unfortunately he doesn’t show up till an hour into the movie. The first hour concerns white settlers being preyed upon by a raiding party of Apache Native Americans. It’s an upsettingly violent extended set piece that never once gets you to feel close to the action, nor does it hit a memorable beat in its camerawork/choreography.

Characters that we have had five minutes of time with are slowly killed, some offscreen, in what amounts to sixty minutes of meaningless, fruitless content. Only a handful of members of the settlement survive, with the Natives getting a pretty bland few scenes post-attack that dive into muddled, unsophisticated politics. One of the surviving members is Sienna Miller, in a truly funny circumstance where she is trapped in a dusty underground bunker and must then don what is clearly a spray-tan for the next 20 minutes, taking you right out of the movie if you didn’t feel that way already. Many actors in this film feel out of place, either due to their 21st-Century look or their poor acting. Sienna Miller is one of the better performers in the movie, but she’s the girlfriend from Layer Cake. Let’s be honest with ourselves, she’s just way too good looking to be credible in the American West.

The Apache raid serves as this strange precursor to a movie that then moves into full sprawl, introducing a multitude of characters that are impossible to invest in. I truly think that the casting director made wacky choices across the board and Costner’s weightless direction and a complete absence of pacing undo the movie further as it moves through its relentlessly dull 180 minutes. A particularly annoying Michael Angarano and dopey Jena Malone make up one of the worst of these threads, with the lame duck pair starring as a newly-formed couple made to suffer for Malone’s past sins coming back to haunt her. Melodrama and piss-poor attempts at tension ensue. This is when the film began amazing me in how inept of a director Costner appears to have become, with he and his writing partner, Jon Baird, clearly taking a page out of Yellowstone’s dumb dialogue department, to boot. Even the great Michael Rooker can’t escape coming off like a dolt. And the music is the final nail in the coffin. One of the most awkward, tone-deaf musical scores in recent memory—just painfully off-putting.

The closest this comes to being decent is when, in the second and third acts, Costner’s storyline finally gets some trajectory due to an incendiary, if ultimately underwhelming, villain. The movie does get slightly less boring for a solid ten minutes there. And Jeff Fahey is pretty welcome as a quietly malevolent scalping gang boss; why isn’t he in more movies? But it all just feels so telegraphed and unnatural and uneven. That Costner storyline feeds into this unrealistic, anachronistic Luke Wilson part that just doesn’t really go anywhere except goofy. This certainly doesn’t feel like the exciting, cool-as-ice cowboy films of old. Inauthenticity and cheese are the names of the game in this faux epic that so clearly wants to be a sincere, updated retelling of its ‘50s/‘60s forefathers. It just fails on every front in trying to do so.

All in all, Horizon feels most like a bad streaming show that was given a theatrical treatment. The overbearing score, tragically horrific writing, lifeless direction, and clueless performances add up to…well…nothing. In today’s parlance, this movie sucks. I’m glad I was the only one in the theater because it would have been hard to swallow others next to me being subjected to this painful exercise in soap-opera absurdity.

1.5/10