the intimate \u201cBlue Moon\u201d<\/a> comes off like a mesmerizing magician\u2019s trick. Now you see me, now you don\u2019t.<\/p>\nHis latest, which premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, is an effective sad-venture movie set during the Great Depression about a hardened prisoner in an Oregon work camp named Samuel Murphy, who gets the coveted chance to reunite with his little daughter.<\/p>\n
All Murphy\u2019s got to do is transport five backpacks full of gold bars with the help of three other men \u2014 plus two brutish overseers \u2014 for 50 miles over six days through the forest to a drop-off point. Easy, right?<\/p>\n
Not so much. Temptation, nature\u2019s wrath and murderous rogues in the woods get in between the dogged man and his freedom. His journey is brisk and engrossing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJohnny Oleksinski<\/p>\n
Directed by Padraic McKinley, \u201cThe Weight\u201d has a simple construct we\u2019ve seen many times before, and the film doesn\u2019t set out to upend it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ethan Hawke braves the wilderness in \u201cThe Weight.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, familiar though it is, the skillfully made movie finds vigor in the been-there-done-that. The well-worn path is pepped up by the artful use of the vast wilderness, which is actually Germany. Chopped-down logs hurtling down the river are an unusual and deadly threat. Lightning illuminates a killing like a horror strobe light.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And the film\u2019s indie status, forcing the filmmakers to take the tactile route, lends \u201cThe Weight\u201d a ruggedness that its polished studio brethren in this genre so often lack.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
A fine example comes during its best scene, in which the crew \u2014 Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaard T\u00f8nnesen) \u2014\u00a0encounters a rotting rope bridge. The gold is too heavy to lug across it, so Murphy stands in the middle on a creaky plank as they throw bricks to him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The edge-of-your-seat sequence is genuinely alarming without relying on any of the cheap tricks usually used to freak out viewers. The risk feels real, like Nik Wallenda walking the tight rope over Niagara Falls, and we worry not only for his life but also for the valuable metal that could plummet to the bottom.<\/p>\n
Samuel is trying to secure an early release to return to his little daughter. Matteo Cocco<\/p>\n
Murphy has a solution for seemingly every roadblock, and his \u201cMacGyver\u201d quality keeps him an enigma till the very end. Where did he learn all this? Why is this relatively skinny guy such a skilled brawler?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Earlier at the work camp, he impresses the warden (Russell Crowe) by figuring out how to move a giant boulder using just a couple of sticks and small stones. Plus, he fixes his broken-down car.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how the crafty Murphy gets the assignment to haul the precious cargo for the warden\u2019s friend, a shady mine owner who wants to prevent the government from confiscating the gold on orders from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The cast and team of \u201cThe Weight\u201d attends the Sundance Film Festival premiere. Getty Images<\/p>\n
The others on the trek are less layered or intriguing aside from Anna (Julia Jones), a Native American who joins them against the wishes of some and proves invaluable.\u00a0Jones is striking in the part.<\/p>\n
Sans much detail, it\u2019s the group members\u2019 attitudes that keep them engaging.<\/p>\n
For instance, the person we assume is going to be the troublemaking villain actually isn\u2019t. And Murphy is not as invulnerable as he appears.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Weight\u201d isn\u2019t as deep for Hawke as \u201cBlue Moon\u201d was. With a hoarse, threatening voice and mean glare, he\u2019s pretty much the Eagle Scout version of Liam Neeson in \u201cTaken.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
What it shows, though, is he\u2019s an actor with so much variety to mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"movie review THE WEIGHT Running time: 112 minutes. Not yet rated. PARK CITY, Utah \u2014 Ethan Hawke is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,36127,47954,206,74292,98265],"class_list":["post-435929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ethan-hawke","tag-movie-reviews","tag-movies","tag-russell-crowe","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}