Into the Ashes (2019)

rating: ***

the story: Vicious thugs end up getting their comeuppance.

review: If it weren't for the performance of Robert Taylor as the sheriff whose son-in-law goes on a revenge rampage, I wouldn't be talking about Into the Ashes.  I watched the movie at all because it was another of James Badge Dale's string of minor 2019 releases, the best being Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Donnybrook, which like the latter also costars Frank Grillo.   Grillo has been a fascinating career to follow recently, too, and he gives a different kind of performance, in the same basic role, than he does in Donnybrook.  (A far cry from my first distinct memory of him, in Warrior, where I assumed he was a real-life MMA fighter cast to give authenticity to training sequences.) 

Dale, meanwhile, has such a minor role in this one that he doesn't spend too much time creating a distinct character, which is the opposite of what he did for Donnybrook.

But as I said, I'm talking about Into the Ashes at all because of Robert Taylor.  I know, who?  There's an earlier Robert Taylor, but this one is the guy who starred in the latter-day western TV series Longmire.  Late in the movie he settles into a low drawl that totally transforms the performance, and becomes the best reason to watch, and talk about, the movie.

Because suddenly you're watching the western Harrison Ford never quite made.  Ford did make a kind of western, Cowboys & Aliens, but even as it was being billed as "Indiana Jones Meets James Bond," the movie was much more centered on Daniel Craig than Ford's grizzled rancher.  The Harrison Ford being channeled in Into the Ashes actually comes circa Blade Runner 2049, one of the many times in recent years Ford has revisited an iconic role.  As in Cowboys & Aliens, Ford's work in Blade Runner 2049 is a relatively minor one, all considered, but in it he seems at last totally comfortable as an older person.  If he'd made a western (I suppose he still could), it would be Into the Ashes, exactly as Taylor does it.

And Taylor looks like Ford (except, maybe, the hair, but why quibble?), and I can't help but wonder if that was all completely deliberate.  Before I got swept up in the idea, I even thought the filmmakers were deliberately looking for a bargain basement Ford, but Taylor is a relatively known commodity.  I have no idea if he did the same sort of channeling in Longmire, never seen it and probably never will.  But by the time we're following Taylor's sheriff basically more than anything else (sort of making the movie in the same spirit as No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, respectively, in similar roles, but here perhaps at its best, even if the other elements aren't), it no longer really matters.  Taylor is fulfilling what Ford had done, but would probably never do this way.

And maybe doesn't have to, really, now that Taylor has.