A lot has happened in the past decade. Anne Hathaway has had some pretty spectacular films, while Johnny Depp has had more than a few flops. There have been a plethora of fantastic reboots, but some genres seem to have fallen to the wayside. Sci-fi had some low points, despite Star Wars being a consistent exception. Even lower still, though, is the Western genre.
Westerns often conjure up images of lone gunslingers riding their trusty steed across the American frontier of the late nineteenth century. As luck would have it, that tends to also be the case in film. Between Clint Eastwood's iconic stare to the everlasting rivalry between Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, the world is never lacking in Westerns. Occasionally, however, it is lacking in good Westerns. With the help of Rotten Tomatoes, it's clear which have been particularly bad in the past decade.
Cowboys And Aliens (2011) - 45%
With a cast list that includes Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, and Jon Favreau behind the camera, it's hard to imagine a movie ending up anywhere near the bottom of any list. Especially since Jon Favreau seems to have hit his stride with space Westerns. Still, try as the did, they just couldn't escape the fact that bad writing is bad writing. The movie's tone bounced around and seemed to fall victim to an identity crisis. Cowboys fighting aliens is a great concept, but a great film needs more than just a concept.
Jane Got A Gun (2016) - 43%
Speaking of great concepts, a Western with a gunslinging female protagonist, played by Natalie Portman no less, sounds like a sure thing. Well unfortunately, in a not-so-shocking turn of events for a genre saturated with male leads, the female protagonist in Jane Got a Gun actually has to ask her ex for help. This poor choice could have possibly been uplifted by phenomenal directing and writing, but that also is not the case. Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor do their best, but it just doesn't end up being enough.
Brimstone (2017) - 42%
Guy Pierce and Dakota Fanning star in this offbeat Western about a sadistic preacher preying on women. Brimstone takes on more of a thriller/horror feel as it progresses, which would be fine if it were well implemented. Unfortunately, poor acting, lazy writing, and by-the-books directing make for a pretty forgettable experience. To make matters worse, it runs for around two and a half hours, which just feels gratuitous considering the lesser-known people attached to it. Scorsese has earned long runtimes, the makers of Brimstone have not.
Forsaken (2016) - 42%
Father and son team up both behind and in front of the camera in this by-the-numbers Western. Kiefer and Donald Sutherland star as a gritty, stoic gunslinger and his estranged reverend father, respectively. In all fairness, the movie doesn't do anything particularly terribly, but it's just so mediocre that it's hard to get excited about it. It's a typical concept, with frontier people fighting for their land and recruiting the help of a hardened gunslinger, who in this case is just Jack Bauer in a cowboy hat.
A Million Ways To Die In The West (2014) - 34%
Comedic Westerns don't come along too often. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs won plenty of awards when it came out in 2018. A Million Ways to Die in the West, however, did not. Seth MacFarlane can be very talented, and he managed to get a handful of laughs and a completely stacked cast into his movie, but the crude toilet humor cliches, recycled Family Guy gags, and uninspired directing tends to leave a sour taste in one's mouth.
The Lone Ranger (2013) - 31%
It may be difficult to remember a time for big-budget Disney movies that didn't have Jedi or superheros, but that time wasn't so long ago. In fact, it was only a few years ago that Disney made the tone-deaf decision to cast Johnny Depp as the iconic Native American character, Tonto.
Additionally, they seemed to blow their entire budget on over-the-top action sequences and skimped on the screenplay, leaving audiences with a bland, bloated, self-indulgent Western adventure.
The Warrior's Way (2010) - 29%
Combining overused Kung Fu movie tropes with Western cliches and randomly chosen Fantasy elements, this bizarre work of cinematography struggles from the very beginning. The acting is uninspired at best and cringeworthy at worst, and the screenplay feels like it was written by an angst-ridden teen. The Warrior's Way wasn't quite bad enough to become a cult classic, but wasn't nearly good enough to be a classic.
The Dark Tower (2017) - 16%
Perhaps there was too much source material here. Perhaps Stephen King created such a complicated universe in his Dark Tower series that a single movie could never have captured its essence. After all, there are thousands of pages of book and only and hour and a half of movie.
Whatever the case, The Dark Tower completely missed the mark. The stellar cast just couldn't pull together the convoluted story and sacrilegious alterations to the original source material.
Priest (2011) - 15%
Vampire hunting is no stranger to the film industry, but in this case, it really should be. Priest is the story of a priest (no surprise there) who goes against the church's laws to hunt down the vampires that killed his niece. It's a pretty typical revenge story, set in a Victorian steampunk-ish setting, and the special effects are decent, but the acting is flat and the writing is derivative, borrowing elements from a number of better movies from almost every other genre.
Jonah Hex (2010) - 12%
Jonah Hex follows a disfigured bounty hunter with otherworldly powers, who is recruited by the government to take down a terrorist with the help of his horse-mounted gatling guns, which sounds like it could be a Red Dead Redemption II mod. What starts as a fantastic concept for a Western/fantasy adventure quickly falls apart as Megan Fox desperately tries (but fails) to distinguish herself from other Western movie love interest characters and Josh Brolin does a mash-up impression of Rocky Balboa and the Man with No Name, complete with cliche one-liners and an expressionless face. Brolin also starred in the critically acclaimed True Grit the same year, though, so it's hard to blame this one on him.