Now available on Xumo Play
A quiet western town sees a few visitors including a gunman and a sumo duo. Soon things take a turn when a revenge-fueled criminal comes to stake his claim against those he believes wronged him.
Written by Andrew Freund, Craig Hamann, and Alexander Nevsky, and directed by Joe Cornet, The Wide West is an entertaining western with some fun scenes throughout. However, something is missing here, the film is quite short, and it feels like it robs the audience of character development and proper story arcs. It’s a simple story and clearly meant to showcase the two sumo wrestlers, but the fact that most of the story’s background comes from the slide show with historical facts at the end creates a film that feels like it’s missing about a third of its storyline. What is here works, but something is missing and the run time, while barely over one hour, could have been (shock, gasp) longer. Usually films go overly long lately, but The Wide West is quite short, and it causes it to be missing something or at least feeling like it is.
The cast here is clearly enjoying themselves with co-writer Nevsky taking on the lead who feels like he might be a brother to his character in his two previous western films. The work he does is decent and he does have charisma to carry the film a bit. The duo who play the sumo fighters, actual sumo fighters from information found, are a bunch of fun and so is their trainer. Hiroki Sumi, Takashi Ichinojô, and Kaz Kobayashi are fun here and they are clearly enjoying themselves. While not given much outside of a few scenes, they do the most of their screen time. Tatiana Neva, as Sybil Malone, also makes the most of her screen time here. The cast as a whole is decent and entertaining, with a few exceptions.
The cinematography by Sam Wilkerson looks good here throughout the film with the exterior sequences looking the best of the bunch in general. This is solid work on a more limited budget. The score by Sean Murray is mostly good at highlighting scenes and moments, but at times, it goes in “too much” territory where the music overtakes the scene and leaves very little room for any kind of nuance.
The Wide West is an entertaining new western with a twist on the genre by bringing in sumo wrestlers. It is quite short and the historical facts at the end could easily be cut completely or at least reduced with that screen time given back to the story to get more development and character arcs. As it is, the film is like a day-in-the-life type of thing that doesn’t look at its characters too deeply. That being said, the pace is fast, there are no lulls, no sequences that kill the momentum, it’s all very quick and easy to follow. The story could have use a bit more time and so could have many of the performances.