Butcher's Crossing

MOVIE #1,391 • 🍿🍿🍿 • 02.22.24 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 56. Well, it’s another Cage western! This one came out a year before 2023’s very bad The Old Way. It opens as a Harvard boy heads west. We hear him speak in voiceover as the opening credits play over some authentic period photography, ads and maps. This is Kansas, 1874. He wants to see the world and have some adventures before he returns to what whatever prim and proper life a Harvard boy had in the late 1800s. Seeking out a guy who his father used to know (played by Academy Award nominee, Paul Raci), he links up with a rare fully bald Cage at a saloon instead. Cage is looking to go out on a buffalo hunt. This brings up an interesting point: is Cage bald in real life? This seems like a natural clean dome to me. Cage tells him what's what…

So Harvard boy is gonna bankroll this wild and dangerous buffalo hunt. Others in town think that Cage is delusional and that this pack of beautiful buffs is a pure fantasy. Cage shaves his head so WE KNOW he's not naturally bald…


And again later in the snow, to really drive this important part home: CAGE IS NOT NATURALLY BALD! STOP SAYING THAT...


They find a guy with his balls chopped off and a pair of antlers stuck up his dead booty. Then they get lost almost immediately and can't find water. It's really neck and neck between what's worse at this point: this or The Old Way. That one at least had Clint Howard. Eventually they run into some buffaloes, a whole shitload of CGI buffsters…



And also some ridiculous green screens…


Which is weird because they definitely shot some/most of this on location. Whatever. They start the hunt and Cage immediately and easily starts picking off buffy boys…


I'm sure there will be some, oh I don't know, conflict or drama in this eventually. Because killing these bison looks pretty easy. Anyway, moving on.

Cage plays a character named Miller which keeps making me think this movie is called Miller's Crossing but I think that's just my subconscious wishing that I was actually watching Miller's Crossing.

The skinner man character is a bit of a wildcard. This is the closest thing we have to a conflict in the picture. Everyday they wake up, shoot and skin more bison: Wash, rinse, repeat. Harvard boy gets some kind of a virus at one point and has a weird hallucination montage where Cage eats raw buff meat…


But it's not a dream as we see him doing just that in the next scene? They've been there three weeks now and they're just figuring out that they won't be able to take home this many hides. But Cage is hellbent on killing every last one. It's not very complicated to him, though…


The film develops a maniacal tone at this point that's a little interesting. Maybe it’s crazy editing for the sake of crazy editing, but at least it’s something different to look at. “Do buffalo ever go crazy,” Harvard boy wonders. But I don't think it's THAT herd he has to worry about losing their minds. 🤯

All of a sudden it's winter and they're dealing with a massive blizzard. They're stuck in this place for six months now (!) on account of the snow and what have you. The skinner man throws the crazy old dude's bible in the fire because he’s an asshole and the old dude takes revenge by slowly poisoning his food, which leads this unintentionally hilarious diarrhea scene….


Everybody is basically going bonkers. They somehow still have liquor after all this time, though. Skinner man figures out he's being poisoned and beats the old guy to death. They bury him with his scorched Bible and a bottle of whiskey.

It's finally spring and they can go home. Cage does a title drop…


Almost immediately their overloaded wagon full of like 10,000 pounds of pelts breaks loose and goes over a cliff, taking skinner man with it…


R.I.P... I love the long beat at the end of that sequence. Cage and Harvard boy get back to Butcher's Crossing and find the whole town nearly deserted. Paul Raci is one of the only guys left in town and he tells Cage that the hide market has bottomed out (everyone who wants a buffalo hide already has one apparently) and so their prized lot is essentially worthless. We get something of a moral from this guy…


Cage goes crazy and starts a big fire, tossing buff pelts into the flames. The movie ends with Harvard boy riding into the sunset before some more old photos and a postscript which reads….


And that's that. In the end, this is probably the better of Cage's two 2020s westerns, but not by much. They tried to stylize it in the edit but it just made the picture more tonally jumbled. I still don't think this is a genre that really suits Cage, though these are hardly the productions to accurately assess that notion.




THE VERDICT: 3 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.

This March on The Year of Cage I'll be going through early entries in the A-Z filmography that I accidentally skipped over, starting with one I saw ages ago: 2000’s The Family Man.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,390 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,392 ⫸

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Butcher's Crossing is a 2022 American Western film directed by Gabe Polsky in his narrative feature film debut, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by John Edward Williams. It stars Nicolas Cage, Fred Hechinger, Xander Berkeley, Rachel Keller, Jeremy Bobb, and Paul Raci. It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was released on September 9, 2022.