THE WEIGHT Review

Ethan Hawke is carrying a fortune in stolen gold across a hundred miles of Oregon wilderness in 1930s America and he is also, less metaphorically, carrying this entire film on his back. Both jobs are difficult. He is better at one of them than the other but he gives everything to both.

The premise of The Weight is the kind that sounds irresistible in a pitch room. A labour camp inmate gets offered early release in exchange for transporting government gold through the wilderness with a ragtag crew of prisoners, armed guards, and one Indigenous castaway, while a merciless warden played by Russell Crowe spits tobacco and watches from a comfortable distance. It is Sorcerer transplanted to the Depression era Pacific Northwest, shot in Germany standing in for Oregon, which gives the whole thing a dislocating eeriness that is either an asset or a problem depending on how you feel about forests that look slightly wrong.

Hawke is genuinely wonderful here. He plays Murphy with this refreshingly modern, unadorned physicality, a man who is smart and resourceful and completely focused on getting back to his daughter on the other side of all this, and watching him navigate the shifting internal dynamics of the group is consistently engaging. The crew around him has genuine texture too, particularly Austin Amelio as a live-wire fellow prisoner whose unpredictability keeps you alert in a way the plot sometimes does not.

The atmosphere is The Weight's greatest strength and its editing is its greatest weakness, which is a frustrating combination. There are sequences here that are genuinely arresting, a scene lit entirely by lightning and thunderclaps is the kind of thing you remember for days, but the final stretch feels like it lost twenty minutes somewhere between the shoot and the edit suite. Characters appear in places they were not moments ago. Motivations blur. The romance subplot involving Julia Jones materializes and then dissolves without leaving much trace either direction.

McKinley clearly loves the films this is paying homage to and has the atmosphere and the lead performance to honor that love. What he does not quite have is the ruthless editorial control those films possessed, the willingness to cut everything that does not serve the journey and let the muck and the weight do the talking.

Hawke makes it worth the slog. He usually does.

🍿 SCORE = 62/100