Rust Parent Guide

Orphaned and adrift on the plains of Wyoming in 1882, thirteen-year-old Lucas Hollister (Patrick Scott McDermott) has been trying to care for his little brother Jacob (Easton Malcom) for months, but things keep getting worse. The latest tragedy is Lucas’s accidental shooting of a thoroughly unpleasant neighbor, a crime for which he has been sentenced to hang.

On his last night before the big drop, Lucas wakes up to find the jail raided, his jailors dead, and a frightening old man (Alec Baldwin) ordering him outside and taking him on the run. Lucas can’t imagine what this taciturn stranger wants with him, but he learns one important fact: his name is Harland Rust. And he is an exceptionally dangerous man.

While this movie definitely has an “elephant in the room”, and while that elephant has enough baggage to overload a jumbo jet, none of that is pertinent to the quality of the film. If you want the sordid details of the fatal accident that occurred during the film’s production, there have been enough news stories and court reports to satisfy your curiosity. I’m just here to talk about the movie. And unfortunately, it’s pretty grim.

The script is a mess, to put it bluntly. It offers as faithful a look at the old West as does Back to the Future Part III, which tells you all you need to know about the quality of the script. The dialogue bounces between being offputtingly 21^st-century or sounding like the town drunk doing a Yosemite Sam impression. Both options are bad, but the middle ground sometimes evens out somewhere around tolerable. None of these problems are ameliorated by the editing. Scenes do not so much flow into one another as jostle abruptly like passengers trying to cram their luggage in the overhead bins all at the same time.

There are other problems. Baldwin is certainly gruff enough for this back country bushwhacker and jailbreaker, but he doesn’t exactly look settled on a horse – a significant weakness for a Western. Parents are more likely to have issues with the film’s content than Baldwin’s equestrian grace. There are frequent scenes of bloody violence, several scenes of a sexual nature which include prostitution, and a good amount of drinking, smoking, and cussing to round it all out.

Mostly, though, Rust is just slow. I found myself looking longingly at the “exit” sign on the theater wall during the many scenes which were too dark to make out. The scenes that you can see actually look pretty good, but every time you think the film might start reeling you in, the dialogue comes back like a risky food court lunch to remind you that you would, in fact, prefer to be somewhere else at the moment. Anywhere else.