Gunslingers

Gunslingers (2025) is an uncannily on-point, accidental self-allegory. The movie is set in Redemption, which would be your standard frontier town with a wide Main Street, a saloon, and a room over the saloon occupied by a sexy hooker were it not that it was founded and it’s mostly populated by wanted criminals who have faked their deaths with one another’s help to escape persecution — a rather unlikely, quite possibly unheard-of Town with a Dark Secret/Close-Knit Community hybrid.

The film stars Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham (whose character rents a room over the saloon and is called a “whore” once, although I’m pretty sure it’s figuratively), and Nicholas Cage wearing a bowler hat and cross-shaped dark glasses that he never takes off, and speaking like a Scratchy-Voiced Senior. I suspect these aren’t performance quirks so much as a legitimate attempt to lie low.

In this film, their characters come to Redemption to become unwanted. In real life, these actors are drawn to obscure, anonymous pictures like Gunslingers because they have become unwanted. Redemption’s graveyard is filled with empty coffins, the void within representing what these individuals’ careers have come to. I’m a child of the 90s. I know that 30 years ago, this would have been a dream cast. It pains me to write these words as much as it would have pained the filmmakers had they realized the extent to which they were blurring the line between fact and fiction.

There is, mind you, intentional symbolism in the script. The problem is that the characters live a purely symbolic life wherein the symbol and that which it symbolizes are one and the same. For example, the unspoken notion that living in a place called Redemption automatically redeems you. We’re expected to root for a townful of rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, vipers, con men, bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, train robbers, bank robbers, and shit-kickers whom we...