Butcher’s Crossing: Review

10th November 2023

Butcher’s Crossing: Review. By Daniel Rester.

Nicolas Cage has been venturing into interesting territory with his choices of roles the past few years. He occasionally still turns out some direct-to-video dreck, but he has also been embracing fascinating characters in indies and genre pictures. From Pig (2021) to Renfield (2023) to Dream Scenario (2023), Cage has been delivering lately. He has even taken on Westerns, with The Old Way (2023) earlier this year and now Butcher’s Crossing.

Butcher’s Crossing is based on the 1960 novel by John Edward Williams. It has been adapted here by Gabe Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy and sees Polsky in the director’s chair as well. Polsky is mostly known for directing sports documentaries, so it’s intriguing that he decided to dive into Western material. This story obviously struck a chord for him, and it mostly shows on the screen.

The plot unfolds in the mid-1800s as Harvard dropout Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) heads to a small town in Kansas called Butcher’s Crossing. The town survives on buffalo hide trading, with McDonald (Paul Raci) cornering much of the hunting territory. The naive Will wants to go on a hunt as he seeks the so-called adventure and romanticism of the Old West.

Will decides to finance a hunt led by Miller (Cage, with a beard and shaved head), an experienced hunter who wants to find a valley in Colorado that supposedly holds hundreds of buffalo. The two team up with an old cook named Charlie (Xander Berkeley) and a cantankerous skinner named Fred (Jeremy Bobb). The crew does in fact find many buffalo, but arguments begin to arise when Miller refuses to head back until he has killed all of the buffalo in the area.

Cage has been known to dive into over-the-top madness for roles. Here he gives Miller more of an understated obsessiveness while Bobb ends up being the one who goes wild with anger more often. The two going head to head is gripping at times. Hechinger and Berkeley get less to do in their roles, but they aren’t weak links.

Polsky can’t quite decide if he wants Butcher’s Crossing to be traditional or revisionist, so he dips his toes in both. Many classic tropes of the genre make appearances, but Polsky also provides slick sections of over-edited flashbacks and he slightly explores the psychological deterioration of Miller and Fred. The flashbacks and visions I could have mostly gone without, but I do wish Cage had a bit more time to flesh out Miller’s darker psychology. I kept waiting for a juicy monologue from Cage that never came.

The main goal of Butcher’s Crossing is to show the wastefulness of the white hunters who obliterated the buffalo population in North America. Polsky succeeds in getting this point across as he shows the hunts in unflinching ways that are occasionally hard to watch. Miller could have all he needs within two weeks, but he forces his crew to slaughter more buffalo beyond that for little reason beyond greed.

Butcher’s Crossing is a simple but solid Western with beautiful locations. Cage turns in another intriguing performance to go along with his recent output, even though Miller never quite pops as much as he should. Polsky’s film can be muddled at times, but the director mostly shows confidence despite this genre being unfamiliar territory for him.

Rating: 7/10

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