The Age of Commercialism

Highly Overrated But Still Good

An Exercise In Nonsense

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Like the title suggests, the film has a slow pace as it moves on its quest through the western landscape. The plot sees an idealistic young man seeking out his love who fled to America to escape a crime. The young man is joined by an older, more cynical man - unaware that he has joined him to use the young man to lead him to the girl and her father in order to collect the bounty on their heads. It unfolds in an episodic manner within this overall sweep.The result is a film that is engaging in the most part, has plenty of good western tropes, and is short enough not to make the slow pace hard to take. That said, it also is meandering, doesn't amount to too much, and seems more interested in the episodic oddity of itself than it does making something cohesive. I think it will depend on the individual how that works; for me personally I felt the strengths of that outweighed the weaker aspects. The tone carried it for me, although I didn't think the ending worked particularly well as part of the total package. It is beautifully filmed, which is one of the western aspects it uses. Within the landscape the cast are generally good, but it is the work from Smit-McPhee and Fassbender that makes the majority of it work. When you are with them as a viewer, the film is enjoyable and carries itself. Not a film that really hits its mark, Slow West still offers a nicely engaging slow pace which plays out with good tone and pace, even if it doesn't feel like it comes together as a whole.

Slow West is a kind of brand new werstern that takes place in a beautiful landscape without precedents. This is an epic journey of a naive hero who goes through dummy but lovely situations which could remind you of Alice's Wonderland because its psychedelia and its moments of intoxication. A bitter-ending amateur odyssey plenty of charming beauty so far away from the cliches of the genre. Is this iconoclastic and cool tragedy the last of the acid westerns?

"Slow West" kinda disappointed me. From first till last it's calm, cool and collected and the cinematography was very fresh and original but it it means nothing and totally lives up to its title. The lack of any real dramatic incident left me indifferent to where events are heading but did the Brits making this movie not realize these were actual people American viewers would recognize? In some scenes we see "Wanted" posters with the faces of real-life 19th century Americans such as Robert E. Lee. The back story doesn't answer questions like why the girl is an outlaw or how the boy knew how to find her, and how he got from Scotland to America considering his youth and lack of funds. Would a real 19th century bad-ass really shave a young man. It's one poky Western, on a death march to a pointless ending without actually saying much of anything except that things were very dangerous in the olden days

I am writing this review fresh from watching SLOW WEST which in my humble opinion is absolute mince. Another reviewer called it surreal and that just about sums it up. Very poor entertainment, no chances of any prizes for this film. Three of us watched it together and within twenty minutes it was unanimous to switch it off. However, as the eternal martyr (as in, I paid for it) I continued alone to the end, and what a weird end it has. I won't give away what very little story-line there is as it is too trivial and unconvincing to put into words. My only reason for writing this is to reduce the Star Rating on this film which is FAR FAR too high. I can't think what the other reviewers were on when they rated this, but we all want some!! John Pollock.