Critic Reviews

It’s too monstrous and mean-spirited to please everyone unconditionally, but I found it challenging and honest — and hair-raising enough to work as a modern morality tale in cowboy boots.

A classic, if downbeat, addition to the canon.

A well-made, rough-edged and solid frontier fable with a distinctive look and fine performances all around.

Never Grow Old isn’t a top-shelf western, but it’s thoughtfully made, with something to say about how even in a country that encourages rugged individualism, community matters.

Wearing the proverbial black hat and speaking his menacing lines in a husky, near-whisper, Cusack thoroughly galvanizes the proceedings.

Kavanagh’s second coup was in giving this too-familiar tale just the right star power, with the criminally under-used Hirsch shining as our anti-hero and Cusack, settling into the playing-the-heavy part of his career with as much wit as he can muster.

Ivan Kavanagh has an eye for style and a clear gift for building suspense. That said, the film is sadly less than the sum of its frequently-impressive parts. If nothing else, his messy, violent, dark and sad reflection of our society proves that the Western will never grow old.

As revisionist as it might aspire to be, Never Grow Old is rife with clichés, Cusack’s philosophical villain one of the most conspicuous.