The Weight review – gold in them hills

At the absolute least, debutant director Padraic McKinley is probably going to be bombarded with work offers on the back of this feisty first feature about a group of convicts coerced into assisting with a gold heist during the Great Depression. Ethan Hawke is really quite good as a clean-cut shitkicker named Murphy who is sent down for some hard labour when he accidentally clobbers a gang of undercover cops while attempting to protect his young daughter. He’s pissed off, but decides to keep his head down with a view to securing early parole and scooping his littl’un out of the halfway house. 

When harsh-but-fair chain gang overseer Clancy (Russell Crowe) notices that Murphy has a little bit more up top than the majority of these slack-jawed reprobates, he dangles a deal in front of Murphy: help me retrieve and hide a cachet of gold before that jackal FDR and his government stooges get their greasy mitts on it. And so the deal is set; Murphy picks three helpers to assist in the mission, and it’s a six day trek across the Oregon wilderness.

It’s a simple, well-executed set-up that plays like an homage to the million trail westerns that came before it. What elevates proceedings is that Murphy is quite the dab hand when it comes to all forms of engineering, and The Weight often doubles as a kind of practical survival guide, with Hawke playing a mean-eyed MacGyver-type fixer. Fixing the engine of Clancy’s duffed up Ford 18 is what initially gets him noticed. Later, he’s applying the laws of physics to the laws of survival, making sure his crew are able to safely transport the gold through rocky terrain, across swelling rivers, and over a rope bridge that is nearing the end of its life.

Where The Weight falters, unfortunately, is in its slightly haphazard direction, with moments of high tension often dissipating before they reach their natural peak. It’s almost as if McKinley doesn’t always realise when he’s on to a good thing, rushing through set-pieces (the rope bridge an example) that could easily run to double, even triple their runtime. One climatic must-win car chase is executed with no sense of scale or attention paid to where the two racing automobiles are in relation to one another. And some scenes are captured by cinematographer Matteo Cocco with a strange, soft-edge fisheye look that feels anachronistic to the time when the story is set. It’s a shame, as this is a good film that could have been very good, even great, with a little more attention paid to the pacing.