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At the very least, debutant director Padraic McKinley is probably going to be bombarded with job offers behind this gritty first feature about a group of criminals forced to help with a gold heist during the Great Depression. Ethan Hawke is really good as Murphy, a clean-cut shitkicker who is sent to some tough work when he accidentally arrests a gang of undercover cops while trying to protect his young daughter. He’s furious, but decides to keep his head down with a view to securing early parole and scooping up his little one from the halfway house.
When gruff-but-fair chain gang supervisor Clancy (Russell Crowe) notices that Murphy is a bit above these slack-jawed reprobates, he dangles a deal in front of Murphy: Help me retrieve and hide the gold stash before that fox does. FDR And his government hands get their greasy hands on it. And so the deal was set; Murphy chooses three assistants to help on the mission, and it’s a six-day trek across the Oregon wilderness.
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It’s a simple, well-executed set-up that plays like an homage to the million trail westerns that came before it. Murphy is quite the dab hand when it comes to all kinds of engineering, and The Wait often doubles as a sort of practical survival guide, with Hawke playing a mean-eyed MacGyver-type fixer who upstages the proceedings. Fixing the engine of Clancy’s duffed up Ford 18 It notices him initially. Later, he applied the laws of physics to the rules of survival, ensuring that his crew was able to safely carry them through rocky terrain, across raging rivers, and across a rope bridge nearing the end of its life.
where weight Shrinks are, unfortunately, somewhat ambiguous in direction, with moments of high tension usually dissipating before reaching their natural peak. McKinley is always on point, rushing through set-pieces (the rope bridge example) that can easily be doubled, tripling their runtime. An all-weather must-win car chase is executed without any scale or attention to how two racing automobiles are related to each other. And some scenes are captured by cinematographer Matteo Cocco with a strange, soft-edged fisheye look that feels anachronistic to the time in which the story is set. It’s a shame, it’s a great film that could have been so much better with a little more attention to pacing, even better.
