Kill or Be Killed

A Western about a gang slowly making their way across Texas to reach some gold one of the gang hid after a robbery went sideways. They rob and kill as they travel, to have enough money to keep themselves supplied (although I doubt they were being frugal with their loot). Soon, they're waking up in the morning to find another member of their gang dead. All the gang's attempts to stay awake and catch the killer fail.

The movie tries to play so coy with who is doing it, it makes it surprisingly difficult to have any suspense. They don't make any attempts at traps or setting up some kind of a alarm. They find no clues, none they recognize anyway. Since you have no sense of what's going on, or what they could possibly do to avoid death, it becomes this sort of dull inevitability. They will make camp, one of them will be told to be on watch, that person will wake up the next morning and another member of the gang is dead. There's no stakes, or suspense, and since the gang is a bunch of cutthroats and murderers themselves, it's not like you feel bad for them.

The dialogue is stilted, where you can tell they're trying to make it sound different from how people would talk now, but what they end up with is things phrased so oddly no person would actually say them. Granted, True Grit got away with that, but this movie isn't remotely in the ballpark of True Grit (either of them). The main character, the leader of the gang, keeps having dreams of a man with the remains of a toga wrapped around his waist and flames coming from his eyes (done with absolutely horrible CGI), crawling into their camp at night and getting ready to kill someone with a machete. I assumed this meant there was a supernatural aspect to what was happening, which thankfully there isn't.

The gang members are at least somewhat differentiated from each other, to the extent there's a chatty, unlucky one, a big religious fella who looks like he ought to be in one of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films instead. An old, cranky one who is kind of cautious, a goofy kid. Which isn't to say you end up caring about any of them, but at least they try a little on that score.