Review: The Last Rodeo — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Last Rodeo

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

Stars: Neal McDonough, Mykelti Williamson, Sarah Jones

Writers: Jon Avnet, Neal McDonough, Derek Presley

Director: Jon Avnet

 

The best movies take you to places you’ve never been to meet people you’ve never dreamed of, and for city slickers like me, The Last Rodeo meets those criteria to a “T” with the span of a Texas longhorn.

That’s true, at least, for the movie’s electrifying rodeo sequences, capturing the violent art of America’s original sport. Alive with the jerking, jaw-shattering violence of men improbably trying to stay on the back of a bellowing, bucking bull for eight short, eternal seconds, those scenes leave us holding on to our seats for dear life, digging our fingers into the fabric and croaking, “Whoa!”

If only the film’s human drama were half as compelling. As it is, when The Last Rodeo isn’t thrilling us with moments of hoof-pounding cowpoke action, it abandons us to a frustrating, foot-shuffling melodrama that expects its faith-based throughline to fill in the gaps.

Neal McDonough — whose piercing blue eyes, chiseled features and stony demeanor have made him a go-to guy in dozens of military and cop movies — stars as Joe Wainwright, a former world champ rodeo rider whose life tanked following the death of his spouse (played in flashbacks by McDonough’s actress wife, Ruvé). Rock bottom came 15 years ago, when he tried to ride while roaring drunk, and got a broken back for his trouble.

Joe has long since quit both the sauce and steers, and is now a somewhat stiff-walking Texas rancher. And although he’s a doting father to his grown daughter, Sally (Sarah Jones of TV’s For All Mankind) and adoring grandson, Cody (Graham Harvey), Joe is still angry at the world for the loss of his wife and rodeo career.

Joe’s life becomes even more complicated when he learns his beloved grandson has a brain tumor that requires immediate surgery. The news comes in a way that eerily reminded me of the last time I had my oil changed: Joe and Sally are sitting in the hospital waiting room when a woman with a clipboard comes out, glances over the invoice and declares the tab will run roughly $250,000, after insurance. Will that be cash or charge?

Of course, who’s got that kind of money? Certainly not a washed-up rodeo rider. But Joe has an idea: He’s just been invited to participate in a Legends Rodeo event, happening that very weekend in Tulsa. If he could just climb onto a bull — broken back and all — for the first time in 15 years and defeat the world’s current crop of rodeo superstars, well, he could win the million-dollar grand prize!

It’s a crazy idea, but as they say in the movies, it’s an idea so crazy that it just might work. Joe gets his old rodeo partner, Charlie (Mykelti Williamson, forever embedded in our frontal lobes as Forrest Gump’s business partner Bubba), to take a week off from his job at UPS to help out. Charlie’s ostensible job here is to help Joe train and then be the guy who pulls him out of the way when he tumbles off that bull (hopefully, after the mandatory eight-second mark). But really, Charlie is here to periodically brandish his Bible and find a suitably encouraging passage, causing Joe to stare off into space with those glowing blue orbs and stoically nod his head.

Will Joe prevail at the rodeo? Will Cody get that thing in his head taken care of? Will there ever be any doubt? The chief problem with The Last Rodeo seems to be that its very busy, yet distressingly schematic, screenplay was co-written by director Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes), Derek Presley (whose new thriller, Tonic, just made a positive splash at Cannes), and McDonough, the film’s star. Indeed, the movie plays as if the three men each devised a separate movie, then Scotch-taped the pieces together: Avnet contributed the human drama; Presley the action sequences; and McDonough, a great advocate of faith-based cinema, the Sunday School lessons.

The result is a film that seems more interested in its themes than its narrative. Most egregiously, the very problem that has been driving Joe back to the rodeo — raising money for his grandson’s surgery — is resolved less than two-thirds of the way through when his old friend, an Oklahoma millionaire (longtime movies bad guy Christopher McDonald) creates a GoFundMe page on the boy’s behalf and promotes it nationwide. After that, Joe’s quest for rodeo glory becomes less a mission of faith and love and more of a selfish act that could result in his daughter having to care for him for the rest of his life.

The Last Rodeo is distributed by Angel Studios, a faith-based company that’s revolutionized the movie business by polling their audiences before greenlighting projects and then funding those films through crowdsourcing. They’ve distributed some pretty good movies about people who find strength and meaning through faith, often re-discovered in the face of trial. (Later this year they will be distributing the childhood fantasy Sketch, one of my very favorite films at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.)

Anyone can get a sermon by stepping through a church door on Sunday morning. The power of faith-based cinema is in showing how faith — often largely unspoken — quietly informs the lives of the faithful. The best such films reflect the curious ways in which faith can seem to throw up obstacles to the plans of mere mortals while actually guiding them to the best possible, largely unexpected, outcome.

The Last Rodeo breaks that mold, and not in a good way, opting to play more like a throwback to one of Billy Graham’s pioneering-but-preachy World Wide Pictures projects from the 1960s.

That’s called preaching to the choir, and in the long run it’s the difference between filling pews or theater seats.