Review of True Grit (2010) by Robert I — 22 Jan 2013

Pretty good, but someone's really gotta remind the Coens how to cut a film. 20-25 minutes easily could've been trimmed, would've been just as good if not better. Now, personal biases, the character of Mattie Ross completely fell flat. It's a peeve of mine whenever children in movies don't sound like children. Mattie sounded like a screenwriter or a novelist. You can write children who sound smart but are still children. Otherwise she might as well be a vampire kid who's 3000 years old, cause that's how she's talking. Then again halfway through the film both the two male leads can hardly talk due to speech impediments. Oh well. The other bulls*** I'm calling is on the few critics calling this a three person character study. No, sorry. Maybe loosely, but not primarily. Thankfully only a handful I read tried to justify the lack of action as that nonsense. Comically, Jeff Bridges is pretty funny and a few other jokes and weird characters sneak their way in to help ease the film through. The story is what it is, not really great but serves its purpose to set up the set pieces. And, always good to see a man get shot in the head without a cut away in a PG-13 film. Go America.

So there you go, Western nerds, you have another frontier/guns solve everything film you can enjoy. And at its core, it's pretty enjoyable.