Hell on the Border

Where to start with the issues? Buildings with beautifully fresh and smoothly sawn walls, houses with aluminium roofs, six shooters that didn't need reloading, disjointed action sequences moving at glacial speeds...... Camerawork was crude, used jerkiness and lens flare etc to no benefit. One of the worst films I've seen in the last year, this was inconsistent, uneven, unrealistic and frankly has nothing to commend it except that it chose a story that should be told. Avoid.

Despite the obvious b-grade quality, Ron Perlman, Frank Grillo and the genre of western was enough for me to give it a try - I do occasionally enjoy the little movies with good ol' actors just having a fun time. Well, "Hell on the Border" is probably the lousiest western I've seen so far, but, thankfully, not entirely without a heart.

In the most aspects of filmmaking, "Hell on the Border" is weak and painfully cliché. The plot, based on the true story of Bass Reeves, the first black U.S. marshall, is stitched together from arcs that we've seen a hundred times before & in a hundred better movies. I mean, there's literally not one hint of originality in "Hell on the Border". Same applies to the characters, though the duo of David Gyasi and Ron Perlman was at least mildly entertaining to watch. Frank Grillo, the villain, did a fine job. In portraying a mostly boring character. A pacing that drags constantly & a high predictability factor - these are a few additional "qualities" this movie possesses. Most frustratingly, "Hell on the Border" is also a mess regarding all technical and aesthetical means - the cinematography is boring, even sketchy, the lighting & color grading's effortless and way too amateur, the whole movie has a drab, grey-ish, even ugly look. Some random shots are extra grainy. To make it all worse, the original score was massively overused & it was as cheap as everything else in this flick. Most of the action sequences were wack and unrealistic. For a 2019 movie with such actors, even for the usual b-movie, "Hell on the Border" is technically embarrassing.

When I said it has a heart, I meant only the aforementioned acting duo of David Gyasi and Ron Perlman, plus the extremely conventional story line - yes, conventional, not entirely useless. Nevertheless, I recommend "Hell on the Water" to absolutely no one, except if you're sold on the same things I was. You have been warned though. My rating: 3/10.

Of course this could have been better, but I enjoyed the story and it inspired me to research Bass Reeves

What a disappointed this movie was! Westerns are not the easiest movies to make, most of the time it's just macho behavior against other machos. In this movie it's basically the same but in contrast with good westerns (where they have good actors that can play mean vilains, like Eastwood, Van Cleef and others) you now get a movie full of machos but played by bad actors and a very lousy directing. What the hell was Ron Perlman thinking to play in this movie? Did he read the script? Was he desperate for a role? It's certainly one of the worst if not the worst movie he ever played in. The story of Bass Reeves sounded like an interesting story to make a movie about, but this is just an insult to his story. Wes Miller did a messed up job writing this story and he did an even worse job directing it. People getting gut and leg shots look like they could run a marathon two minutes later, it's just beyond ridiculous. The drawing of the guns in the usual face offs you get in westerns are so slow it's just laughable and painful to watch. There is absolutely nothing good about this western, probably one of the worst westerns I ever watched, certainly in my top three of stinkers in this genre. And then you got the music which absolutely didn't fit in this movie, very irritating. In fact the whole movie irritated me, couldn't wait for the end to come.

Given that African Americans haven't been represented well in the western film genre despite in real life having a big impact during the days of the wild west, I was really interested in seeing this movie, especially since it was based on a real African American lawman (Bass Reeves). But whatever your ethnicity may be, I am pretty sure that you will find this movie to be simply terrible.

The portrayal of Bass Reeves here is extremely unsatisfying. About all that the movie can think of to do with this character is for him to regularly meet people who are racist and/or doubtful he can do the job, and brood silently about it. If they had really explored this character deeply, I'm sure things would have been better.

However, even if great effort had been made to portray Bass Reeves in a multidimensional manner, the movie would still have been pretty awful. Right from the start, viewers will see that the movie did not have much of a budget - cinematography looks almost like VHS quality, the locations are drab and boring, there's not much in the way of props, the costumes look too clean and too new, and the sets are really flimsy and cheap.

Probably due to this pittance of a budget, the filmmakers didn't seem able to put in a lot of spectacle. The movie is really slow-moving, with a lot of (cliched) dialogue instead of action and a swift pace.

I'm sure the filmmakers had their heart in the right place, but the end results indicate that they should have waited to get a bigger budget (and a better script) before filming started. As it is, it's yet another Lions Gate / Grindstone production that's way below par.