A stacked cast and a smart script makes The Harder They Fall one of my favorite movies of 2021. Not many westerns are made these days so as a genre picture, it stands out from the crowd even further.

The Harder They Fall is about Nat Love. His mother and father are killed in front of him by the pistols of the notorious gang leader, Rufus Buck, when he’s a young boy. When the story picks up years later, Nat is an outlaw and a bounty hunter. When he finds out that Buck has been rescued from being a prisoner by his Crimson Hood gang, Nat turns to his own Love Gang to go after him and stop him once and for all.

This movie doesn’t do anything new for the genre. It’s got the same stakes: revenge and a lot of money at stake. It’s a fusion of modern cinema aesthetics (it looks super slick and clean, the action scenes are very rambunctious with a camera eager to fly around to catch everything), with some throwback mixes of Spaghetti Westerns and Blackspoitation films. This is the kind of movie that I’m sure Quentin Tarantino liked and will appear on his best of the year list. So while it doesn’t do anything that new, it does everything really well.

The revenge story is set up from the first scene and that leads to a great reveal at the end. Every character that shows up gets a great intro and later, their time to shine. The cast is really big, some of the biggest and best Black actors in the business right there. They each fit a great role in the story and stand out in their line delivery and costumes. Everyone looks different and has their own quirks. In just 2 hours I got a good feel for everyone and when their death came about, it felt meaningful. That’s a great achievement from the pages to the screen. There are a ton of great lines and plenty of memorable scenarios. The script pulls out every kind of emotion to set up and follow through with scenes that keep everyone in motion. Sadness and sorrow, anger and opportunity, excitement, suspense, danger, relief, compassion, greed, morals, and companionship.

I’ve never heard of director Jeymes Samuel, he’s done some work in the industry in the music department before this. He met the right contacts doing that because he got his shot to make this movie in a big way. There was a serious budget for this movie, it all shows up on the screen. He directed the hell out of this and despite using modern music for a movie that is set a hundred years ago, I think those choices work really well. I had so much fun watching this. I was engaged from start to finish and I liked every character. The sides are drawn as good vs evil, or maybe not so bad vs evil. The bad guys are cool and are more than just bad for being the sake of being bad, there’s depth and reasoning behind what they do. So much right happened with this movie that the entire production team needs to work together again. I highly recommend The Harder They Fall as it’s from an exciting new filmmaker that could bring us more great movies.