Angel and the Badman review

Angel and the Badman was just sort of bad, which is disappointing because I’ve enjoyed a lot of what Angel Studios has released this year.

This is a remake of the 1947 John Wayne Western of the same name. Zachary Levi plays Quirt Evans, a wounded outlaw taken in by a family whose daughter, Penny, played by Meg Fraser, starts falling for him. Tommy Lee Jones plays Marshal McClintock, and Neal McDonough plays Laredo, the outlaw pursuing Quirt. The family nurses Quirt back to health, his criminal past catches up with him, and he has to protect the people who helped him, even though he’s the reason they’re in danger.

There’s a workable movie in that premise, but I didn’t find much of one here. The dialogue is trite, the story is predictable and sometimes nonsensical, and the supporting bad guys barely amount to characters. It felt like an evangelical Christian stage play put on a screen, right down to the cute child getting lines clearly meant to make the target audience laugh. I’ve seen plenty of those plays, and I recognized exactly what this was doing. It wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t fun.

That’s frustrating because Angel has picked up or financed some good independent films this year, bringing movies like Solo Mio, Runner, The Brink of War and Young Washington to theaters. The first three were generally well reviewed, and I personally thought Young Washington was pretty good. I support companies like Angel, A24, MUBI and NEON because they provide the financial backing and distribution that help independent movies get made and seen while the major studios are off chasing comic book IP and blockbusters. I want Angel to keep doing that work, and I’m fine with its religious and family orientation. But that still needs to result in a good movie, and the faith and redemption story here never becomes convincing.

The romance is a big part of that problem. Penny has a respectable local option who isn’t particularly exciting, and then this criminal arrives and immediately becomes the interesting one. His arrival also brings the people who might get her entire family killed. I understand the appeal of a dangerous man being redeemed by love. That’s an old story. But the movie didn’t give me enough reason to believe in their relationship or her choices. She doesn’t have much agency beyond being the young woman who sees something good in him, while her family’s encouragement seems to amount to telling her that the decent local guy is boring.

I don’t think every decent guy has to get the girl, and I don’t think a religious movie has to reward all the good people and punish all the bad ones. That’s not how life works, and it’s certainly not how the biblical stories themselves work. But if you’re selling a movie on faith and redemption, you still have to make the redemption convincing. Here, I mostly felt like I was being asked to root for the exciting bad boy over the responsible guy, even as the bad boy nearly gets everyone killed. I’m not sure what message they thought they were delivering with that.

The cast should have been able to give this more life, but they don’t have much to work with. Why is Tommy Lee Jones in this? He’s a great actor, and it’s frustrating to see him in something this weak. McDonough and Levi can do better work, too. These are people who know what a better movie looks like, but their presence doesn’t rescue the dialogue or make these characters interesting.

I’ve enjoyed plenty of modestly made romances and family movies. There still needs to be a convincing relationship, interesting characters or dialogue worth listening to, though, and this doesn’t clear that bar for me. I paid to see it, I wanted to like it, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t recommend it.