Jane Got a Gun

I went to see Jane Got a Gun because I thought it was based on the Aerosmith song “Janie’s Got a Gun,” which I really fucking hate, but I’m at least familiar with it. This is the same reason some people listen to oldies stations and a lot of people don’t want to let immigrants into our country: They may really fucking hate and be sick of what and who they already know, but at least it doesn’t challenge their preconceptions.

I learned that Jane Got a Gun isn’t based on that shitty Aerosmith song. Well, it’s about a Jane who gets a gun, and she’s motivated in part by protecting her child from a bad man. But this movie is a western, not an overblown 80s hair metal dirge whose video looks like Shannon Tweed softcore porn.

Jane is played by Natalie Portman. She’s a homesteader in post Civil War New Mexico. She has a little girl who has one shitload of marbles. Seriously, the kid has a huge basket of them. It’s a small detail, but once I saw her horde all I could think was that this kindergartner must be some sort of keepsies wizard who’s hustled every other kid in the valley.

Anyway, Jane’s husband (Noah Emmerich), a wanted fugitive, returns to their desolate ranch shot up worse than a Texas Democrat’s pumpkin the Halloween before elections. The dastardly Bishop Boys gang is on his trail. Jane has to hide her kid, enlist help and defend her land, her dying husband and exact her own revenge on the Bishops. Her challenge is that the only help she can (or bothers to) enlist is her former fiancé (Joel Edgerton), a man she thought had died in the Civil War, but who has been stalking her.

There are three things that bugged the shit out of me in Jane Got a Gun. They bugged only me, though, because I was alone at the Landmark Olde Town Arvada on Friday night. Hell, this bloated corpse of a theater is usually empty. Despite the fancy restaurants, new high rise apartments next door, lofts across the street, and the booming business of serving overpriced cocktails to assholes in the neighborhood, the Landmark steadfastly insists on decaying, letting the bacteria and maggots devour its crumbling seats, burnt-out neon and water-stained ceiling.

Back to the three things that bugged me. This movie feels like it wants to make a strong statement about tough women and the power of maternal instincts but it fails hard. Sure, Jane gets a gun but she barely fucking uses it. All the cunning and violence are farmed out to the men. Twice she has to be rescued from being raped by men. In the movie’s showdown, she’s shot in the gut and mostly stays out of frame while men shoot men. Jane Got a Gun feels like its concept got steamrolled by the easy western conventions, that actually making a feminist western was just too damn hard to bother with.

That leads me to my second big problem. It’s pretty damn easy to make a western set in the high desert look dramatic and rugged. Too easy. Anything post-John Ford needs to do more than give us sweeping vistas to make an audience feel like it’s really the Wild Wild West. But Jane Got a Gun takes place in the most obvious of places: saloons with swinging doors and tinkling pianos, upstairs brothels and homesteads set among dry cliffs. It’s like director Gavin O’Connor and writers Anthony Tambakis, Joel Edgerton and Brian Duffield got all they know about the old west from Gunsmoke and Bonanza. It doesn’t help that a lot of the dialog is anachronistic, more slapdash than period correct. The resulting in the whole thing being a slightly grittier version of a Knott’s Berry Farm stunt show.

Worst of all in Jane Got a Gun is that the characters suck. Jane’s too fucking passive to be a hero, gun or not. And her backstory comes through a shitload of lazy flashbacks; a better movie would have found a way to tell this story chronologically and still kept its secrets. Instead, the audience gets scenes of sun-dappled lovers running through amber waves and soaring in hot air balloons. Basically, the sort of cornball shit you expect from a Nicholas Sparks story, not a tough western. There are too many overlong scenes of dialog, sometimes just reiterating what we had to sit through in flashbacks.

The movie works hard to make its main characters victims of circumstance, which would be fine if this movie were nuanced. But, the movie mistakes cornball horseshit for subtlety. Meanwhile the villains are cartoons. Ewan McGregor’s gang leader might as well twirl a Snidely Whiplash mustache for all his subtlety. His henchmen sneer and leer like drunks at a peep show.

This is clumsy shit, a superficial western made by people with big ambition and little vision. The best thing about Jane Got a Gun is that Steven Tyler never shows up. Two Fingers.