Some Thoughts on "Living by the Gun"

"Living by the Gun is no life."

Living by the Gun (2011? 2014?)

Directed by: James Miller
Produced by: James Miller, Darren Knapp, Cheryl McIntire
Written by: James Miller
Budget: I couldn't find any concrete information concerning this movie's budget, but sources lead me to believe that it was less than one of my paychecks.

Starring: Tommy Admire, Jeffery Babineau, Amber Beasley

It's a good time to be a fan of westerns. In the past few years we've gotten a handful or two of really good westerns, some of which sit comfortably in the standard tropes and some of which step outside the norm and deliver something different. If you haven't seen 3:10 to Yuma, Revenant, or Bone Tomahawk, do yourself a favor and check them out.

We start with the Uncle and Niece, the sole members of a homestead, and who apparently have major beef with each other. Niece wants to be a shooter so that no one can tell (paraphrased directly from the movie). We get some major exposition which feels like it's been cut-and-pasted from other, better movies, and Uncle rides off to murder people for money. Soon after, the Niece follows.

The rest of the movie follows the adventures of Uncle and Niece as they carve an underacted, poorly-executed murderpath across the southwest.

Before I get too into it, here is a picture of the title screen, which I think represents exactly what the next 1.75 hours will be like.

Don't adjust your TV, this is how it appears on-screen.

Some Backstory
It was the equivalent of my Friday night and I was enjoying a beer and browsing the titles on Netflix and Amazon. With the recent expansion of streaming services by the actual telecoms, the OG streamers have been buying up these low-budget, sometimes-independent movies, presumably because they're dirt cheap.

I had just watched Bone Tomahawk (again, do yourself a favor) and was looking to continue with the Westerns. This one caught my eye. I'm always looking for movies I wouldn't recommend to anyone (spoiler alert), and the 2/5 Amazon rating and 4/10 IMDB rating made the decision for me.

Within the first ten minutes I wasn't sure whether I was watching a parody or inept homage. By the twenty minute mark I knew it was the latter.

The Good
I'm still fairly certain that this movie, and everyone involved in its production, was actually trying really hard to be a legitimate entry into the R-rated western genre. The costumes and setting come across as fairly authentic and it doesn't try to romanticize the time period. People are dirty, the buildings aren't impressive, and the production managed to actually get a number of horses, which tend to be expensive and difficult to work with. I mean, it has it's own theme song, that I'm pretty sure was written exclusively for this movie.

There are one or two individual shots in the film that I really liked. There's a moment where the Uncle is hiding in a barn from his pursuit, and the lamp outside casts a moving shutter-like shadow through the slats in the wall which actually looks really good and works.

If you imagine it's an alien life-form the movie becomes
far better.

If you're a fan of facial hair, this movie has so many mustaches and beards that you could populate an entire Tumblr with pictures and not run out of content for a while. The Uncle's mustache overhangs his mouth like a cartoon, and as the story progresses you keep meeting one-off characters with such huge mustaches that if you made it into a drinking game you would probably wake up in the hospital.


The Bad
This movie was clearly made by people who are attempting something that lies outside of their potential. The acting throughout, almost universally, is so bad as to be distracting. The Uncle does a fair enough job, but the actress playing the Niece is worse than the kids in my high school who were forced to try out for the theater productions. At one point we meet a prospector character who spends his entire five-minute scene giggling and high-stepping around in his bright red long-johns, only to get shot by the Niece soon after. This is probably the best acting job in the movie.

Let me reinforce the previous paragraph. The Niece's acting is some of the worst I have ever seen in any movie. I'm not exaggerating. At certain points she's delivering dialogue in an Old West dialect without any attempt at an accent, and it comes across like...a high school production. I feel like I'll keep coming back to that point, because this almost felt like something my friends and I would have made way back when.

Speaking of theater productions, the movie swaps to flashbacks every so often, which are in black and white. While the props and costumes look perfectly acceptable in color, shifting them to black and white makes the entire movie feel like a Drunk History sketch. All it needs is a plinking piano track and you've got something similar to a silent movie.

This is the standard for gunplay in the movie.

It doesn't help that no one here wields their guns with any intent. In a movie named Living by the Gun some emotion put behind the fingers on the triggers and no one here seems to care; everyone is obviously holding prop guns.
you would expect the actors to treat their weapons and the firefights with some sort of weight or respect. Whether it's reverent of the gun or repulsed by it, there needs to be

Finally, this movie is nearly two hours long. Epic westerns are fine, because it lets you take in the sweeping vistas, the tense gunfights, and the moral ambiguity. That's nice, but I'm pretty sure this movie has discovered how to capture time dilation and deliver it through an audio-video format. I say this because I checked the clock at what felt like the two-hour mark and discovered that only thirty minutes had elapsed. I felt physically tired by the end of this movie, and I was watching it from the comfort of my leather armchair.

The Ugly
I want to edit this into a comedy. There are certain scenes throughout that look like they're shot to be comical. One early example is when the Uncle goes to collect his payment from a man who hired him to commit a murder. As the man counts out his money, the Uncle takes his wallet...then reaches into the man's jacket and takes his pocket watch...then reaches into the man's jacket and takes a pair of cigars. If it's supposed to be a sign that he's a criminal, it comes across more as him simply being a dick.

I'm right there with you, buddy

Should You Watch It?
Sober: No.
Not Sober: Still probably no.
Living by the Gun is obviously an independent endeavor, and there is very, very little information concerning its production. I dug fairly deep and found out that it was filmed on essentially a $0 budget with almost entirely volunteer cast and crew, and equipment borrowed from a Californian non-profit TV station.

It's for that reason that, ultimately, I can't come down too hard on it. While it's definitely not a good film by any stretch, the cast and crew at least tried, and produced a full-length film with some actual props, real animals, and a (mostly) authentic appearance.

Rating:
2/5, Discount Matinee at the Purgatory Multiplex