The Duel

When revenge's not an agenda, but an opportunity knocks!

Lately I have been watching lots of blacklisted screenplay films. Some of them were really good, but most of them were not. This is one of those, and I'm not convinced. The story wise, it was decent, until the secret was revealed. After that part, it's become completely uninterested. Because that twist was not par with any decent western film. In fact, it was same as what we had seen in those that sets in the modern day themes, but here it was in the second half of the 1800s.

So the story was the bad thing for this, but the actors were good. I liked the Liam Hemsworth. Woody Harrelson was not bad either, but his negative kind of role pushes us away from liking him and so the...

Are you an assassin? Im a Texas Ranger. Youre neither.

In 1888, a government agent (Liam Hemsworth) is sent to investigate a town in east Texas and its mystic leader (Woody Harrelson) as to why people from south of the border wind up missing there. Alice Braga (Marisol) and Felicity Price (Naomi) appear on the female front, both striking in different ways.

The Duel (2016) is a well-made atmospheric Western with Hemsworth stalwart as the protagonist and Harrelson superb in the Kurtz-like role. As with The Long Riders (1980), it shows that a quality Western can be made in the East. Long Riders was shot in Georgia while this one was filmed in Mississippi, about 220 miles east of the Texas border. Its reminiscent of The Proposition ...

The Duel is the kind of movie that brings a knife to a gunfight. This is a western, mind you; were expecting a showdown at high noon your in standard frontier town with a wide Main Street, a saloon, and a room over the saloon occupied by a sexy hooker. Instead, we get a "Helena duel" (two, actually), wherein "You shall pour out each other's blood and we will cover it with dust. Whomever bleeds the dirt red the most today, his deeds shall not be forgotten." Yeah, I dont get it, either.

As far as I can discern, this film is an allegorical indictment of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps; never mind that that group was dissolved six years before The Duels release (though the Minuteman Project, a comparatively less Ku Klux Klany organization,...