The movie starts in Montana somewhere vaguely in the 1960s - enough into the decade that the early 1950s can be described as being somewhat in the distant past, at least - and while neither "Montana" nor "the 1960s" are a thing that the movie really beats you over the head with, one of the film's greatest strengths lies in evoking a sense of place and time all around the edges of the movie. Because that first film is really quite a commandingly lovely thing. By my reckoning, this turns into basically a whole new film twice in the middle, and I certainly preferred the film it started as to the films it becomes. The nature of this head-butting starts off entirely verbal, but it fairly quickly turns violent, and once it has gone violent, it goes all the way violent.Ī revenge thriller, then, but the tricky thing about Let Him Go, not to mention the frustrating thing, is that it covers a whole lot of generic and tonal ground over the course of its 113 minutes. So she inveighs upon her taciturn husband, ex-sheriff George (Kevin Costner), to track the elusive Weboys to their home base, where they butt heads with the magnificently awful Weboy matriarch, Blanche (Lesley Manville). The easiest way to think of it is as a grandparent-centered, Western version of Taken operating at one-tenth speed: Margaret Blackledge (Diane Lane) is concerned that her little grandson Jimmy (Bram & Otto Hornung) is at risk of being abused after her son's widow Lorna (Kayli Carter) marries - reluctantly, and obviously unhappily - Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), hot-tempered son of the violent Weboy clan. I'm not quite sure I get why that would be the case, but it's a fine enough slice of methodical storytelling for patient, undemanding audiences who don't get why '70s films ever had to stop. ![]() box office (and, if I were a betting man, I would suggest it will probably be the last time we see such a lofty number in 2020, now that Freaky missed the mark), which probably isn't all that much more than it would have made in a normal year, but given the benighted times in which it emerged, that's enough to make it one of the vanishingly few examples of a movie that struck any kind of chord with audiences in the second half of the calendar year. For this, it became the first film released after Tenet to scramble its way above a $4 million weekend at the U.S. ![]() Let Him Go has benefited to an unusual degree from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic: it's a film that almost certainly would have vanished without a ripple in any other circumstances other than being one of the handful of movies to get a large-sized theatrical release in the United States in the last four months of the year, while also having the good fortune to exactly target the only kind of viewers still going to theaters (adults without children in the middle of the country).
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