Summary
The Last Manhunt is a sluggish attempt at retelling a true story, lacking the perspective to be insightful and the pace to be exciting.
This review of The Last Manhunt is spoiler-free.
There’s something a little cynical about the way The Last Manhunt has been marketed. The title, while accurate, suggests a Western that contains more than a single gunfight, and the poster, which has a stern-looking Jason Momoa hovering above the two leads, suggests a film that Jason Momoa is in, at least to an extent that justifies putting him on the poster. Alas, that isn’t the case, though this glacial, contemplative true-ish story is probably the kind of thing Momoa will like when someone tells him he’s in it.
I get it, though – the point of making films is to then trick people into paying to see them. The story of Willie Boy, the hunt for whom was one of the longest in United States history and the last of the Old West, has been seen before on the silver screen in 1969’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, a Robert Redford vehicle that came out long enough ago for the tale to be worth another do-over. Christian Camargo stars and directs from a script by his See stablemate Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett, who also penned Momoa’s outdoorsy actioner Braven, so it isn’t difficult to see how many phone calls it took to get this made.
Willie Boy (Martin Sensmeier) is a long-distance Desert Runner in the tradition of his Chemehuevi tribe, but he’s also in love with Carlota (Mainei Kinimaka), his fifth-generation cousin, which is distant enough for the relationship to not be too weird but close enough to still be against tribal law. Carlota’s father, William (Zahn McClarnon), the tribe’s leader and shaman, is dead against the relationship, but you know what kids are like. When he tries to intervene in their continued escapades, William is shot dead by Willie Boy in a sequence edited in a confusing enough way that it’s hard to figure out exactly how the gun went off, and the lovers are forced to flee into the desert with a posse on their tails.
Allow me to manage your expectations – this is not a conventional Western. It isn’t a taut cat-and-mouse thriller. It isn’t even a love story, really, in that doomed Romeo & Juliet way the premise implies, since the focus is less on Willie Boy and Carlota than the posse hunting them, led by Sheriff Wilson (Camargo) and a couple of his goons, and accompanied by a Native American lawman named Hyde (Raoul Max Trujilo) and a couple of his. Tensions are high within the group, obviously, motivations conflict and the whole thing becomes less about the manhunt than its implications, especially since a sensationalist reporter, Randolph (Mojean Aria), tags along to grossly exaggerate the details and stoke enough fear to sell newspapers.
There are obviously some interesting elements here, some of which would have even been worth making a movie about, but The Last Manhunt can’t decide where to place its focus, so instead ends up flitting between each thing almost at random, which fails to build tension in the chase, and makes several sequences, including a few key ones, feel haphazard and perfunctory. On several occasions I found myself thinking, “Oh, we’re doing this now?”, in a mild state of disbelief at how ineffectively the script had set the moment up.
It’s a shame because you can tell The Last Manhunt isn’t the kind of film that has been knocked together without a care. It’s often impressive to look at – though it relies on the beauty of the natural landscape to do a lot of heavy lifting – and is chock full of Native American actors who’re telling a story about their own people with obvious seriousness. Some of the characters and themes are distinct. You can tell there’s a proper movie somewhere in here, straining against a very lackluster script and all-too-leisurely direction. Those looking for another Momoa outdoorsman adventure will be especially poorly served here, but then again so will most people.
