Brothers James: Retribution
It was a rolling tragedy of blood, death and chaos across Texas and down into Mexico, a trail of avarice and betrayals and ambushes and murder and adopted identities, brothers Frank and Jesse O’Kelly in one of their stops through the desert making the joke to a barkeep that their surname is James, that they are in fact the notorious Jesse and Frank James.
A bounty on their heads, while perhaps not in fact the most wanted duo of the Wild West, they are far from naïve innocents, pursuing the man who murdered their father over a handful of gold panned out of the creek, Kurt Fowler, but financing their operation by means which leaves no divide between them and their quarry, cheating at cards and killing their fellow players when their bluff is called.
Written and directed by Frank Powers who serves in a variety of other production and technical capacities in addition to the lead role of Frank O’Kelly alongside J D Marmion who plays his brother Jesse, Brother James: Retribution is a micro budget western told in flashbacks within flashbacks from a frame of the older Frank recounting his eventful youth to his grandchildren from the comfort of his home in El Paso, Texas, in 1931.
Part action movie, part history lesson devoid of context or significance, along the way the brothers encounter, among others, gunslingers William “the Kid” Bonney and John Wesley Hardin, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, entertainer P T Barnum, boxer John L Sullivan, detective Allan Pinkerton, dentist John Henry “Doc” Holliday and US Marshall Dallas Stoudenmire, a blurring cavalcade of cameos so forced yet pointless Brother James: Retribution feels more akin to a brisk walk through a Wild West re-enactment fair.
The production values makeshift, the costumes are to be commended but are too pristine to convince of the hard living of the old west, the neat seams of jackets and the crisp white of shirts too modern, the locations uninspired with the lights of civilisation visible in the distance of a nocturnal campfire scene, the sets sometimes nothing more than painted flats propped up behind performers who mumble dialogue before waiting to die on cue, while the initial attack has the killers literally stepping out from behind a sheet strung up behind the unsuspecting Paw O’Kelly.
Trying to channel a melancholy for days gone by now lost, the supposed straight forward and upright honesty of an age when revenge was considered righteous and murder could committed with impunity if the killer owned a horse faster than those of the law, the flat, overlit photography which accompanies cuts on every line of dialogue kill any atmosphere more efficiently than hot lead, the lifeless voiceover failing to add the hoped-for depth to the incoherent narrative.
Brothers James: Retribution will be available on the Arrow platform from Friday 20th December
