Deadman Standing is decent for the budget it was done on. It features some okay actors bringing a true American west story to the big screen. It mostly looks really good and features some solid actresses though the majority of the characters could have been better and the writing itself seemed to be lacking. The sound mixing was the hardest thing for me to look past but it was almost made up for with the good editing. At the end of the day, I would say that this is a sub-par western that is worth checking out if you are a fan of true western stories.
Deadman Standing is a low budget western film that revolves around a feud between a family of rich landowners and a small town of poor people. I think? It wasn’t a very easy film to follow. The movie starts off with a man who wanders into a saloon owned by a woman named Rosie and she begins to tell him about the recent events of the town. From that point on the film jumps from past to present to further in the past back to regular past with no warning and it is difficult to understand just where on the timeline you are at any given point.
Another thing that I found rather confusing about this movie was the plot itself. For the most part, I could understand what was happening though rarely did I understand why. The characters’ decisions seemed to often not make sense and I wasn’t sure what within the characters was motivating them to act how or do what they did. There were subplots that were touched on that were quickly abandoned and setups that had no payoffs.
The main character of this movie is most likely the boy, James Riley. The title ‘Deadman Standing’ refers to him in that he has tuberculosis in a time in which it was untreatable making him essentially a dead man. He is deputized by the sheriff and becomes his greatest ally throughout the film. As for the character himself he hardly has any lines so we really don’t know much about him other than he has tuberculosis, he is homeless and he is into one of the employees of the saloon. The character that has the most screen time is the Sheriff of the town, Mike McCluskie. We get the background of his character and learn more about what happened to him and his family that leads him up to this point. He is quickly established as the hero of the film and shown to have a very high moral standard in that he always aims to do what is right for the citizens and help others. There is one particular scene that goes into his backstory though aside from that we really just know that he is the good guy in every sense of the word. The last character I would like to mention is C. Thomas Howell’s ‘Stranger’ who was arguably the most compelling character in the movie, though unfortunately has a very small amount of screen time.
The villains of this film were also a little unclear. The rich Anderson family serves as the antagonists though they were rather underwhelming. At the head of the Anderson family is the father who is present for two and a half scenes (two multi-minute scenes and one very short scene). His motivation for wrongdoings is that he wants to have more land but a good amount of the land in the surrounding area had already been promised to other people. The father plans to use his money to bribe officials into breaking those land agreements and giving him the land. This seems to me to be the equivalent to the villain’s motivation being money, which is one of the weakest motivations a villain can have.
Most of the action throughout the movie was rather cheesy and similar to that of a WWE match, you can see that the punches aren’t landing and the kicks are off. However, at the end of the film, there is a gunfight that is quite spectacular. It didn’t feel as awkward as the other action sequences and it was actually rather fun, I wish there would have been more sequences similar to this one.
One of the better aspects of this film was the visuals. The quality was pretty decent and the color looked really good in the saloon scenes. Though many of the outdoor shots colors seemed to be a bit off and the film lacked an overall visual style. The hues and colors seemed to change from scene to scene and drastically from location to location to the point where the scenes often looked as if they were not from the same movie. Though aside from this inconsistency, the overall look was pretty good. Also, story aside, the editing of this film was pretty solid. I had very little issues with it. Most of the scenes were well covered, the right shots were used to convey the correct emotions, and not of the shots dwells for too long or were too short. It was all around good.
However, my biggest complaint would have to be with the sound. The music used didn’t fit very well for me and many of the voices sounded rather odd. There are two particular scenes in which it very much sounds like the main characters are in a recording booth, you can hear the echoes of the walls and the audio peaking while they are outside. That is something that should be fixed by the time the final cut it out for any film. Though the general sounds were pretty great, especially for a low budget movie. Footsteps, chairs moving, the sounds of the dirt and wood all sounded great yet the gunshot sound was very similar to that of a cap gun.
Overall, Deadman Standing is decent for the budget it was done on. It features some okay actors bringing a true American west story to the big screen. It mostly looks really good and features some solid actresses though the majority of the characters could have been better and the writing itself seemed to be lacking. The sound mixing was the hardest thing for me to look past but it was almost made up for with the good editing. At the end of the day, I would say that this is a sub-par western that is worth checking out if you are a fan of true western stories.
