Gunslingers

Gunslingers can't quite escape feeling like forgettable VOD junk. It does at least try to rise above its standing, and, at times, it comes close to pulling it off.

Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.

Goosed by a couple gratuitous interludes of gory amateur surgery, the movie is eventful, with a high body count. But there’s never the baseline authenticity of atmosphere or character depth that might make so much action meaningful, or even particularly exciting.

In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.

Only Cage’s most diehard cultists will want to go to bat for this performance, and they could easily struggle to accentuate the positive. It’s manic, confounding, and gaspingly funny, too (for a moment), but boy, howdy, so what?

As the mayhem, six shooters and bad-acting go off all around him, Dorff stands above it all, reminding us that this might have been taken seriously instead of all this vamped bad makeup, acting and screenwriting ineptitude and goofing around by players who figure they’re better than this.