Rufus Black (Idris Elba) marches into a preacher's home, kills the preacher and his wife, and carves a cross into their son's forehead. Years later, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) learns Rufus has been sprung from a prison transport train and teams up with U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo) to bring Rufus down. Even with Nat's gang insisting on helping, it isn't going to be easy.
It's a good cast. Regina King and LaKeith Stanfield as Rufus Black's main two people. King as Trudy Smith, who held the gang together while Rufus was in prison and has no patience for fools. Stanfield's the soft-spoken killer, very pleasant when he advises someone to please not do something stupid, then cutting their hamstrings once they do. Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary, who is a successful saloon owner and Nat's off-again, on-again lady. Lindo plays Reeves as quietly confident. He doesn't boast, he doesn't make threats, he thinks some of these kids are fools the way they are doing things.
My favorite (and this is no small thing because I loved Stanfield as Cherokee Bill) might have been Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee, who was Mary's bouncer and sometimes lover (I think). I like that she casually carries just as many weapons as any of the guys, but she has this intense look at almost all times. Like a coiled spring that could snap at any moment and you don't want to be in range when she does. But it's controlled. When she decides to get violent, it's a decision, not her being goaded. The look she gives Majors when he forces her to wear a dress as part of a bank robbery, thought he was going to drop over dead.
It's a creatively shot movie. There's a nice, I'm guessing drone shot, that runs from the room where Elba is looking over his town, down the street past all his guys, and stops in front of Majors where he sits on his horse. Like an old video game that shows you the route you have to take to reach the end, right before everything starts. There's another shot where Stanfield is talking with a soldier through a door and the screen is split, but when the door opens, the divider moves with the door and merges the shots into one.
A big part of this revolves around the city of Redwood, which Rufus Black and his gang apparently established when it was just a territory, and is owned by black people. It's their town, and it's a beautiful place (you know, before the big gunfight and the explosions). All the buildings are vividly colored and decorated. Mary's saloon isn't quite as colorful, but it still has a distinct atmosphere and style. It makes for a fun contrast when Nat Love and Cuffee visit Maysville, the white town that is the whitest place I've ever seen. Whiter than those gag pages of Snowbird fighting in a blizzard John Byrne drew in Alpha Flight.
I don't really like the ending, when Rufus Black reveals to Nat why he killed his father. There could be something in the story he tells about Nat's dad, how he changed as he grew older, and how Rufus might mirror that journey. I don't know all the history of Redwood, but Rufus clearly had a major hand in its formation. I'm guessing at least some of that was funded by the crimes he committed before being captured (by Bass Reeves). And he's determined to protect it against the soon-arriving wave of white settlers. He's still willing to demand every person in town hand over every bit of money they have to fund the effort, but he lets Regina King tell them that if they refuse they and their families will be killed and all they own seized or burned.
It feels a bit like a man who decided it's time to rewrite the story of his life. Re-frame the shit he did when he was younger as the early steps of a man out to build something better. Necessary evils for a greater good. Nat's father did something similar on a more personal level, in simply trying to become a better man, but from a certain angle, it could be seen as him trying to bury the darker part of who he was. There's no indication he went back to try and make amends for his past sins, just decided to start again and do it better this time.
Of course, Rufus Black could just be lying. He's more than content to play the brotherhood card on Nat to twist the knife, but he's just as willing to harm anyone to get what he wants, so I'm not sure anything he says can be trusted. Certainly with regards to his motives. And Redwood ends up pretty badly damaged at the end, buildings shot or blown up, dead bodies all over the place. Is that some larger moral about trying to build something on a foundation of blood and causing misery? It's a town founded, built, lived in by black people, and it gets destroyed in a fight by two groups of black people. But there's that looming threat of the white folks moving into the area which drives some of Rufus' actions. There aren't many white people in the movie, but you can see their hand on certain levers that cause things to happen. I need to think about all that some more.
Anyway, it's an interesting movie, fun to watch. There's some really good dialogue, couple of nice fights, the music is varied and not typical for a Western, but it works for this Western.
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