Unlike what its title might suggest, Slow West (2015) is under ninety minutes in length.  Then again, those words hold true as you watch Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) ponderously “drift” in the eponymous direction.  I had no idea about any of this, simply wishing to pick something short for a late afternoon viewing.  I also realized that I have not reviewed many Westerns for The Legionnaire.  The blurb that I read about it before making my choice mentioned that it is not “original,” and that is as succinct a summation as one can give, not only about this selection but others of its ilk.  Nonetheless, I stuck it out until the end, with some odds insertions along the way, only to be proverbially kicked in the nether regions in the closing minutes.  Come with me as I explain how we get to that point.

We pick up with Jay first, who is not making a Slow West but is stopped for the night, looking up at the stars.  If you know your Shakespeare, this should be a major spoiler alert.  There are a few flashbacks sprinkled in to explain why a person of Scottish extraction is alone in the Wild West, but I shall take care of them now so as to smooth over the narrative.  He is part of Scottish nobility, but is in love with a peasant girl named Rose Ross (Caren Pistorious).  To be more precise, he is smitten with her while she sees him more as a little brother.  This does not stop him from spending as much time as possible with her, and at one point he has to hide under her bed when her father, John Ross (Rory McCann), comes home with a number of his friends.  Later, there is a banging at the door.  This is Jay’s uncle, Lord Rupert Cavendish (Alex Macqueen), who does not approve of his nephew’s consorting with people below their social station.  To this end, Lord Cavendish uses some choice words to which John does not take kindly, so much so that John accidentally kills Lord Cavendish.  Because of this crime, John and Rose flee Scotland and settle in a territory even less civilized than Scotland, which is somewhere in the Western part of the United States.  It is in this direction that Jay is migrating when he comes across a Native American village in the immediate aftermath of its destruction.  He is saved from being accosted by a group of soldiers by Silas, who mercilessly guns them down and offers to guide the inexperienced young man onward, for a fee.  Jay protests, at first, saying that he can manage on his own.  The knowing scoff offered by Silas convinces Jay to agree to the terms.  They get to know one another along the way, and in bits and pieces Jay tells Silas about the reason for why such a person would be undertaking a seemingly foolhardy adventure.  As we come to find out, though, when they stop at a trading post, Silas has an extra motivation for sticking with the Scot.  There is a large bounty on the heads of John and Rose, and Jay is leading the bounty hunter Silas to a profitable target.  At this waypoint, we also see Jay’s determination to get to his beloved when he shoots and kills a woman who is pointing a gun at Silas.  Yet, soon after Silas leaves the woman’s children behind, Jay decides once more to try to again leave behind his rough companion.  This does not go well for Jay, who is robbed by a missionary named Werner (Andrew Robertt), though Silas recovers Jay’s items.  Thus, it is more ambling westward until they meet Payne (Ben Mendelsohn) and his gang, who had been shadowing the pair for some time.  Silas had once ridden with Payne, and the latter tries to convince the former to once more join forces in pursuit of the Rosses.  To help persuade Silas, Payne gets all three of them drunk.  Silas proves impervious to this, too.  What he does do is to confront Jay about his love for Rose, which seems to have an effect on the hardened desperado.  Turning down Payne also makes Jay and Silas enemies of Payne’s bunch, forcing them to escape without their weapons through treacherous woods.  They are also not far from where John and Rose are hiding.  The first bounty hunter to visit them is Victor the Hawk (Edwin Wright), who poses as a reverend.  He first knocks on the Ross’ door to verify his targets, then sets up not far from the house, killing John first.  Jay and Silas are not far behind, though Silas ties Jay to a tree in an attempt to save the kid’s life.  Without a firearm, Silas takes off towards the lone, er, house on the prairie just before the Payne gang arrives.  Rose, along with Kotori (Kalani Queypo), who is . . . um, somebody(?), prepare to hold off the invaders on their own.  Rose wounds Silas first, before opening fire on the rest.  Meanwhile, Jay manages to free himself from the bindings and takes off running towards the house.  He enters in a backdoor and is promptly mortally wounded by Rose.  Rose and Kotori put up a stiff defense, but she is left alone after her companion’s death.  This is when she notices that she had shot Jay.  They share a moment that stretches into Payne’s entrance onto the premises.  Jay’s dying act is to shoot and kill the bounty hunter.  This leaves Silas to limp inside, and he and Rose kneel before the dead Jay.  The closing scene sees Silas beginning a home with Rose and the children of the woman Jay had gunned down.

Slow West has one of those moments I do not like, the kind where everything builds up to what you hope will happen, only to have it abruptly end in the worst possible way.  Despite the murder committed by Jay, which one could argue was done to protect a friend, I appreciated his earnestness.  Regardless, he is a fish out of the water character, and the others seem to sense his naïveté.  This includes the missionary Jay encounters the first time he tries to get away from Silas.  It was also a sequence that got this Catholic’s hopes up about the film overall.  He says some of the right things you might expect from an actual man of God, not one who traveled to evangelize the so-called gullible and profit from it.  This is how you might describe some of the missionaries who went West, though it is not accurate to apply this to the work of their Catholic counterparts.  Indeed, Rome’s missionaries did the kinds of things about which Werner speaks.  He talks about how so much culture is being destroyed with the encroachment of Western civilization, and what a shame it is to witness this process.  The Catholic evangelization effort included a focus on preserving aspects of cultures that did not interfere with Church teaching.  Yet, Werner does not appear to know the biggest lesson of the movie, and that is there is more to life than just living.  He steals from Jay, only to have the same thing done to him by Silas.  Silas, too, looks to be directionless.  To this point, Payne asks Silas what the former compatriot would do with such a large reward.  It is a fair question to ask.  By the end, Silas looks to have found his purpose, or vocation as we Catholics would put it.  A family, albeit a makeshift one, is a good reason to change professions.  It is just a shame that it was not with Jay.

It is hard to ultimately say how I feel about Slow West, not just because of what happens to Jay, but also because of the odd insertions I mentioned in the introduction.  There is a scene where they pass by a group of Africans in the middle of nowhere playing one of their native tunes, and another moment when the trading post has a fitting room.  They stick out to this historian.  Otherwise, it is a decent flick.