The Weight

Mitchell Bupre of the AV Club says a nerve shredding tale of adventure and suspense.

The weight harkens back to old fashioned fare like John Houston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and William Friedkin's Sorcerer.

Peter Travers of the Travers Take says predictable to say the least.

But Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe add a piercing vulnerability to the standard chest-thumping, reinventing Cool Hand Luke as a prisoner, and his warden carve out their own definition of manhood.

yeah he he was also he you've seen him in everybody wants some he was in that he was in hokum as conquistador i don't even remember him in hokum but he's in hokum he got big in the walking dead he played dwight for 37 episodes in the walking dead from 2015 to

2022. see I was already checked out by that time of the show I watched the first four seasons of Walking Dead and then I just checked out man

I remember him as Dwight Dwight was a pretty good character but yeah he saw solid actor and he's got a face for Westerns and historical he just he just has that face but any any final thoughts on the weight Hawk

No, I mean, I recommend it, and I'm actually curious.

It was very paint by numbers with a second act that was incredibly long.

Um, may- maybe the, the more under talked about films that I should talk about though, I saw The Weight, the brand new Ethan Hawke movie that is, uh, sorta being marketed like Train Dreams, you know, period piece taking in, taking place in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, and everybody looks sorta dirty, and they got problems, and they're men, that type of movie.

And, uh, it was good.

It w- it...

Well, in our last episode, we discussed Sorcerer, uh, William Friedkin's take on the same French novel that brought us the classic thriller, The Wages of Fear.

Now we turn our attention to Podrick McKinley's The Weight, which isn't drawn from the same source material, but nonetheless feels deeply indebted to it.

Set in the economic despair of 1930s Oregon, the film stars Ethan Hawke as Samuel Murphy, a widower who's just been evicted from the apartment he shares with his young daughter.

As the two are out searching for another place to live, Murphy runs afoul of the law and gets thrown into prison, where he's to serve out his sentence at a labor camp.

Well, then you got trouble.

Okay.

The Weight.

So, uh, I'm curious to know what you thought of it because we, we did talk about, "Hey, you, did you see The Wages of Fear first, The Sorcerer first?" Then we saw The Weight.

Uh, the movie Heart of the Beast that I saw yesterday, I'm gonna review that in next episode.

The movie that I saw last week, it was called The Weight.

Shout out to The Weight.

[air horn] So The Weight was cl- characterized as a artis- artisan film.

Artisan film.

I think that's the AMC's little program where they're highlighting certain movies that you don't really see a lot of people going...

Well, honestly, you might have seen a lot of people going to the, to this, see this movie, but it's a movie that is very artsy.

It's a movie that's not your typical superhero movie.

We're looking at Digger starring Tom Cruise as a larger-than-life oil tycoon in an eco-satar directed by Alejandro Iñárritu.

Next, Ethan Hawke in The Weight, a gold-smuggling adventure set in the early 1930s.

He plays a man with few options.

whose boss, Russell Crowe, involves him in a scheme to move 50 gold bars from a mine in Oregon to a documentary, the latest from Alex Gibney, It's Knife, Salman Rushdie's memoir brought to the big screen and tells of his ordeal in 2022 when he was repeatedly stabbed at a public event in upstate New York.

You have to take these 50 gold bars and bring them to the destination by a certain time.

Seems simple enough.

This is From the Weight.

It is Russell Crowe as Warden Clancy and Ethan Hawke as Samuel.

Uh, let's go and start off with, uh-

The Weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, the synopsis.

Desperate to save what's left of his family during the height of the Great Depression, a battle-scarred veteran is hired to help smuggle a fortune in gold across 100 miles of impenetrable wilderness.

The director nails the feel, the vibe.

The story goes in places I didn't know it was gonna go, and it's top five favorite movie of the year.

Yeah, The Weight's a pretty good, I say semi-heist film because, uh, technically we kinda see the items being taken, the gold.

So this is just more like a point A to point B transport kind of film.

[upbeat music] Meet Me in the Foyer.

Verily, verily I say unto thee, it's time to dig for victory and fantastic films as you meet me in the foyer, and I carry the weight of your expectation to deliver another marvelous movie review show.

But I needn't carry the burden alone as thankfully I'm joined, as always, by the queen of critics, the one and only Linda Marric.

How are you doing, Linda?