Surrounded

 Surrounded is a movie of striking contrasts, of starkly backlit figures against beautiful backdrops. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the film's stunning opening sequence, a gorgeous tracking shot following Mo Washington (Letitia Wright) from church to saloon; She starts her walk on the pre-dawn gloom, and ends it bathed in sunlight streaking through the dust kicked up by the activity of a tiny frontier settlement gearing up for the day. Teal to orange - an object lesson in complementary colours, immaculately realised.

I took so many screen captures during this one...

 The scene pointedly features natives being brutally manhandled and pushed into cages. The film is set in 1870, just five years after the civil war, and Mo is a black woman passing for a man to avoid attention - so it's pretty frought. She's there to get a stagecoach to Colorado, where a stretch of land awaits her.

 But if westerns have taught us anything, it's that travelling coach is a terrible idea. A botched robbery leaves the travellers stranded in a picturesque stretch of dusty wilderness sans coach. Most of the group leave to go get help, leaving Mo behind to keep watch over a chained captive - Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell; Billy Elliot, all grown up!), a notorious outlaw with a sizeable bounty on his head.

 Toby is a brash, motormouthed fella who alternates between pushing Mo's buttons and trying to escape. An uneasy rapport develops between them as they wait to see who gets to them first - the stagecoach survivors with help, or Walsh's partners in crime.

 There are some complications, of course - the film's best moment involves the great, late Michael K. Williams in a late, mostly stand-alone development - but the meat of the movie is the duel of wills between Mo and her prisoner. The dialogue gets very theatrical at times, with long, blunt, somewhat stilted conversations and monologues in between the shootouts.

 That's where the script, by Justin Thomas and Andrew Pagana, stumbles the most. Some conversations are fine, if a bit stage-bound, but many feel a bit off, a bit forced, and every so often, more than a little preachy. None of this is helped by a lack of clarity as to what the movie is getting at with the central relationship. That is, if it's got anything to say beyond 'people react to things differently' - maybe not, maybe it's just a plot device; If so, it could do with losing a lot of the posturing.

 Both principals do a good job. Wright shows a lot of pain and vulnerability lurking just under her steely gunslinger veneer - one moment in particular, in which she's at her wits' end and admits as much, hits hard. On the whole, though her character seems slightly underwritten. Bell does not have that problem; The advantage of playing an extrovert who sometimes seems incapable of shutting up, I guess.

 Still, Surrounded works well as a genre piece - the action is well staged and exciting, Mo's situation makes for a few good tense moments, and visually, it is sumptuous (cinematographer: Max Goldman). There are more iconic shots of cowboys posing silhouetted in shadows against some beautiful stretch of land than you can shake a six shooter at - and... sure enough, director Anthony Mandler has mostly worked in music videos. The old Russell Mulcahy precedent holds true. There's so much cool western iconography it almost starts feeling a little forced, but it looks good enough to be a feature, not a bug.

Outlaw Johnny Black

 The long-in-development Outlaw Johnny Black has been touted a spiritual sequel to the excellent 2009 Blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite, but a direct comparison won't be kind to the former. Where Dynamite was pacey, irreverent and overstuffed with wild ideas, Outlaw is a little ponderous, earnest and mostly wholesome.

 Still funny and entertaining, mind, and it comes by its earnestness honestly. Michael Jai White stars, directs, and co-writes with Byron Keith Minns, who also has a significant role; Their passion for the material is clear, and it's one of those movies you can tell people had a great time making. But it's about as different a spoof as you could imagine. It shows so much reverence and love for the genre that I think it works better as a light-hearted Western movie than as a send-up of one. It does every now and then deploy the sort of non-sequiturs, sharp observations and over-the top humour its predecessor traded in freely, but here they feel a little out of place.

 Johnny Black (Jai White) is one of those cool, badass, slightly amoral antiheroes who roams the plains in the late nineteenth century hunting for vengeance - he's after the racist asshole who killed his father, one Brett Clayton (Chris Browning, effectively menacing).

 He's got a literal bullet with his target's name on it, and as he rides into a town he signals to the town undertaker that his professional services will be needed before long. An easy, but excellent genre-savvy introduction. Black's there because he knows that the local bank will be hit by Clayton's gang. However, he intervenes to save a couple of Indians from a gang of hoodlums, and is soon forced to run away from the law.

 On the run and without a horse (the poor animal literally kicks the bucket), the outlaw's rescued by a pastor (Keith Minns) who's on his way to take over ministerial duties on the small mining town of Hope Springs and to meet up with a sweetheart he's been corresponding with for years. Things don't work out, and with the pastor left for dead after an Indian attack, Black pulls a Sommersby and takes over his identity.

 The plan is to fake it at Hope Springs until he can abscond with the church's money, but of course the complications start piling on quickly.

 The first complication is Bessie, the pastor's sweetheart, played by Erica Ash - followed by her sister, Jessie (Anika Noni Rose), whom Black falls for almost immediately. But he's also expected to tend to the towns spiritual needs, something to which his temperament is humorously unsuited for. The other main complication is that the original pastor wasn't as dead as Black thought - after an uncomfortable, cringe-inducing farce with his Indian attackers (all the Indians in the movie are pointedly played by very conspicuous non-native Americans), the priest manages to make it to Hope Springs, where Black manages to coerce him to go along with his plan.

 There's also the matter of local land baron Tom Sheally (Barry Bostwick), who knows there's oil near the pastor's house and is threatening to invoke WWRBBM (White Woman Raped By Black Man - an acronym which, hilariously, everyone in the movie knows well) to get a posse to come burn the town down unless he gets the deed to the land.

 It's a slow-moving, classical plotline that hinges on a very predictable spiritual awakening for the titular outlaw (who, to be fair, was never particularly evil to begin with). But it's carefully crafted and engaging enough that its earnestness actually becomes a strength; The scene where Black has a very public epiphany, spurred by memories of his father giving a sermon on forgiveness, is particularly effective and graceful.

 Elsewhere, the movie slows to a standstill - there is absolutely no reason this film needed to be a hundred and thirty minutes long. It doesn't help that the tone is all over the place, with Airplane! style gags thrown in along with more character based- and extremely broad humour and shameless mugging to the camera. Some of said mugging is pretty funny, like when poor, heartbroken Bessie aggressively cries at Black. But there are some real stinkers mixed in, too.

 The cast do a lot to elevate the material. Michael Jai White is one seriously charismatic dude, of course, and he has crack comedic timing. Byron Keith Minns is also very funny, and the ensemble cast that the film has assembled is mostly excellent - whether it's a one-joke character like Bessie or Jessie's slow-witted brother (Eme Ikwuakor), or a more sympathetic, layered character like an ally played by Kevin Chapman. 

 Action-wise it does pretty well. There isn't a huge amount of it, but it does run the gamut: gunfights, a gratuitous bar brawl, horse falls, horse-dragging, and all the stunts you'd expect out of a true-blooded Western; You can tell the crew was itching to do a lot of these. There's also a little bit of martial arts, with a couple of very quick but cool demonstrations of Jai White's skills, and a very funny Jackie Chan-style slap/quickdraw fight.

 White's direction is unshowy and competent; Despite some nice scenery early on and some stylistic references like dramatic zooms, it's not a particularly visually appealing movie - and that, just like not letting the martial arts run amuck, seems like a considered decision. By design, it works best as a slightly corny, meat-and-potatoes Western movie that just happens to have quite a few jokes thrown in.

Red Sun (Soleil rouge)

 Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson,  Alain Delon and Ursula Andress.

 That's it, what else do  you need? Go watch it already.

 OK, fine: Red Sun is a French-Italian coproduction from 1971 shot, like so many Spaghetti Westerns, in Almeria, Spain. It was directed by Terence Young, a brit whose output was as varied as it was diverse; He's best known for a couple of early Bond classics (Russia With Love and Dr No), but his work also includes The Jigsaw Man, Safari and Triple Cross. While the premise - Samurais and cowboys! sounds a bit cynical (as well as awesome), Young was clearly interested in the subject; He had previously written an original script for the '60s OSS117 films that moved the action to Tokyo.

 So let's talk about those samurai, then. They're guarding an ambassador from Japan, who's travelling from San Francisco to Washington to present a ceremonial blade to the president.
 Unfortunately for them, the train is robbed by a notorious outlaw gang led by Link (Bronson). His second in command, Gauche (Delon) snatches the ceremonial katana and kills one of the samurai... and shortly afterwards betrays Link and leaves him for dead, taking all the loot.

 The ambassador revives link, and tasks him to help the surviving samurai, Kuroda (Mifune), with bringing back the weapon before a week is done, or do as honor demands (hara-kiri). He then gives Kuroda a rope with seven knots to remind him of his promise. This, of course, becomes an extremely badass visual reminder as every morning the samurai unties one more knot.

 While he tries to escape a few times, Link's goals actually align with Kuroda's; he wants to hunt down Gauche to discover where he took the money from the train robbery. The problem is that the samurai is honor-bound to kill Gauche on sight.
 It's a buddy comedy, then, as the two men develop rapport and respect for each other - with the added bonus that since Kuroda of course is the straight, ultra-serious half of the duo, Link must then pick up the slack and be the talky, funny one. And Bronson hits it out of the park, playing his outlaw with a genteel, easy charm, and some pretty damn funny lines.

 On their way they pick up Gauche's main squeeze Cristina (Andress), your traditional feisty, amoral western whore, to use as a bargaining chip. They also piss off a band of marauding Comanches on their way, setting the table for one of those forced alliances at the end as Gauche joins the heroes to hold off an indian attack.

 It's a little more violent and sleazy than you'd expect, given its pedigree; the action is pretty bloody- mostly bloodstains, but there's a couple of squirting wounds as well, and Andress shows a fair amount of skin. Standard disclaimers for all spaghetti westerns apply, though the threat of sexual violence never crosses over into actual unpleasantness. Link does behave in a pretty ungentlemanly way; it's easy to see why Cristina prefers Gauche over him.

 The action is great - I don't think Young had done any westerns, but he'd directed his share of war movies and worked with a killer lineup of actors, so he knows how to frame his trio of badasses for maximum impact. There are a lot of cool stunts, explosions, and a pretty impressive fight in a burning field- but my favorite stunt has to be an early one where Link tries to escape by tumbling down a scree-covered mountainside, and Kuroda just runs down the same slope, nimbly keeping pace. Or maybe an explosion where someone ducks under a detonating train carriage; Seemed pretty dangerous.

  The actors are still the main draw, and they're all obviously great. I've already talked enough about the two leads, but Andress is great in a thankless role - scheming and mischievous - and Delon has a lot of fun playing a seriously dickish asshole. I knew I loved him in this when he pretends to kindly help someone up to a moving train, only to shoot him off it, and then looks pleased as punch with himself. Using his charisma for evil.

 So yes, this one is very much worth it. I'm not sure why it's not better known.