Ethan Hawke is amazing in this period action flick

PLOT: In the middle of the Great Depression, a veteran (Ethan Hawke) is separated from his young daughter and sent to a brutal work camp. While there, the warden (Russell Crowe) notices his ingenuity and offers him a deal. He’ll commute his sentence if he agrees to smuggle gold through the deadly Oregon wilderness.

REVIEW: The Weight is easily the biggest highlight (for me) of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A rough-and-tumble period action movie, it features Ethan Hawke at his best in a rugged, heroic role, while director Padraic McKinley takes his cues from grounded action fare, with William Friedkin’s Sorcerer seeming like a direct influence.

It’s set against an intriguing historical backdrop. In 1933, FDR passed an executive order requiring citizens to surrender most privately held gold to the Federal Reserve. The film revolves around the efforts of mine holders to smuggle their gold before it can be seized by the government, but the catch is that every bandit worth his salt knows a lot of gold will be moving around — and they’re ready to pounce.

In this exciting thriller, Hawke’s Samuel Murphy is forced to put together a team of convicts to smuggle gold by hand across the wilderness. The threat is clear: if even one brick goes missing, not only will his parole be cancelled, but he’ll earn a bullet in the head courtesy of the two armed guards sent along with him by the mining claim. The added bonus? Once the gold arrives, he might still be shot anyway, as the only person whose word he has to rely on is his warden, Russell Crowe’s Clancy, who seems far from honest.

Hawke is at his best in a highly physical role. He has the same everyman quality the best seventies action heroes — like Roy Scheider, Steve McQueen, and Gene Hackman — had before the genre went larger than life. You believe he doesn’t care about gold, but will do anything he can to get his young daughter out of the clutches of the state-mandated system she’s fallen into.

Director Padraic McKinley surrounds him with a strong supporting cast, with everyone getting a moment to shine in this classic “men on a mission” movie. Austin Amelio is a standout as Rankin, the mouthy, racist con Murphy has to keep an eye on, while Avi Nash’s Singh and Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen’s Olsen are the cons who have his back. Julia Jones appears as a Native woman working at the claim who tags along with the group.

The film is chock-full of memorable sequences, including a standout moment where Murphy and the cons have to somehow get hundreds of pounds of gold over a rickety bridge — a direct homage to a similar scene in Sorcerer, albeit done on foot. Another seventies flick, Sometimes a Great Notion (a movie Hawke praised to me when I interviewed him a few years ago), gets referenced in a harrowing scene involving water logs, while the film climaxes in a brutal three-way hand-to-hand scrap that drives home just how hard it really is to kill someone with your bare hands.

It’s all evocatively shot, with Munich standing in for Oregon, and scored by Latham and Shelby Gaines, who previously scored other Ethan Hawke films, Blaze and The Kid. Crowe also seems to delight in his turn as a heavy, and he’s ideally cast, even if his role is largely confined to the first act and the climax. Overall, The Weight is an immersive ride from beginning to end, and it would be a crime if it doesn’t get a theatrical release, as this is large-canvas filmmaking that absolutely kills in a theater. Imagine Train Dreams if it were an action movie, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what The Weight is like.

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