Butcher’s Crossing is the second western that Nicolas Cage has starred in in 2023, the first being January’s The Old Way. This time around, cage plays Miller, a seasoned and well-esteemed buffalo hunter in the plains of Colorado. While Miller has never had a huge score himself, he is well regarded as a good buffalo hunter in a trade where buffalo hide is worth a pretty penny. When he comes across the young and naive Will Andrews, a Harvard student who heads west in search of himself, they form a small hunting party to search for what Miller thinks is the largest Buffalo Herd the town of Butcher’s Crossing has ever seen.
I think it bears emphasizing that, if nothing else, this film is absolutely gorgeous. The wonderful cinematography of the Kansas and Colorado countryside by David Gallego is breathtaking. I was enthralled in all the set pieces, the sweeping landscape shots, and the small western town of Butcher’s Crossing. The outfits also worked well for the believability of the setting.
Where the film really goes awry is in it’s story and acting. Aside from Nicolas Cage, who is his usual self in this film, the other actors interchange between average at best and bad, over-the-top cheesy at worst. See the performance of McDonald by Paul Raci, who goes completely over the top in some instances that really does not match the tone of the rest of the film. Cage, at least, does a lot of heavy lifting in the film. And he seemingly had an interesting time on the set of Butcher’s Crossing dealing with his horse “Rain Man”.
As for the story, it felt just too shallow for me. The idea of a party of buffalo hunters slowly going crazy as they deal with solitarity seems interesting enough, but the execution just wasn’t there. The filmmakers needed more time to flesh out the story, spend more time with the characters, and make their descent into madness more believable. As it stands, the story just moves from moment to moment and doesn’t focus in on anything.
Final Thoughts
Butcher’s Crossing tends to border on the line of forgettable for much of the film. Luckily, Nicolas Cage is interesting enough, and the cinematography is breathtaking enough to make it worth it. You can watch this film, but really only for those two elements. The rest, you can just let it be forgotten.
