Starring: Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Levon Hawke

Director: Elliott Lester
Released: 2024

Mood: If everything at work and at home is going wrong and you want to lash out but instead you know you should probably just watch a Western with lots of violence and a hint of a moral story.

When I read The Thicket I was instantly enthralled. It was so dark and funny and everything I wanted in a Western. So of course I was BEYOND excited to hear that Peter Dinklage had bought the movie rights.

But the movie is not the book I fell in love with. It has some good elements, and if you’ve never read the book you might even like it. I could not. I felt betrayed by the script.

I don’t know what led to choosing screenwriter Chris Kelley, who barely has any credits to his name. But he wiped out the entire heart of The Thicket. What’s left is a bunch of characters whose choices don’t make sense, and whose personalities and relationships are half-baked.

The Thicket is still a gorgeously shot movie with lots of brutal action, and another valiant effort to keep making fresh Westerns. It’s worth a watch for those reasons and for Juliette Lewis’s character, if you haven’t read the book. If you have, well, I feel for you.

The Thicket begins with a young man named Jack (Levon Hawke) and his sister Lula (Esme Creed-Miles), whose parents have just died from smallpox. Their grandfather shows up to take them to live with their aunt, which is odd in the movie since this Jack is clearly at least 20.

They have just started their trip when they encounter Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis) and her gang while waiting for a river ferry. Bill takes a shine to Lula, and an argument leads to grandpa being shot and Lula being kidnapped. Jack enlists the help of gravediggers Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage) and Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe) to hunt down Cut Throat Bill and get his sister back.

Bill’s group is headed for The Big Thicket, a heavily forested area of Texas that was still wild at the turn of the century, making it a great place for outlaws to hide out. Jack’s group is being hunted by two deputies in a feeble (movie-only) subplot that does little and goes nowhere.

If not for Reginald Jones, the viewer would probably lose interest in Jack’s group altogether. Still, you do wonder who will survive Bill’s bloody wave of violence.

There’s a line in Tombstone where Wyatt asks Doc what Johnny Ringo is after. Doc replies, “Revenge.” Wyatt asks what for. “Bein’ born.”

This is the driving force behind The Thicket’s cinematic reimagining of Cut Throat Bill, and it definitely makes for a great villain – Juliette Lewis’s performance is so twisted and memorable that I added her to my list of the best women in Westerns.

Bill, aka Wilhelmina, is hellbent on destroying the society for which she was never pretty enough, especially pretty young things like Lula. Lewis speaks in a growl, prowls like a big cat, and her eyes are brimming with demons. Although her character’s dialogue and backstory are a HUGE departure from the book, which has a ripple effect on other characters and plot points, I enjoyed it for what it was.

Peter Dinklage does as much as he can with Reginald, and he does it with fantastic facial hair, but there’s just nowhere for him to go. In the book, Shorty is supposed to be a personality that’s larger than life, vastly intelligent, sharply funny, and highly skilled. In the movie you only get to see him fight twice, shoot twice, and quote literature once.

Reginald is rushed too quickly from his initial badassery into a guiding father figure role, which is a big waste of Dinklage. It’s especially disheartening because he spent 10 years trying to make this movie, and I bet the character we got on screen isn’t the one that made him want to buy the rights. He’s still a total powerhouse, and if you don’t know what the role could have been, he makes a memorable Western performance.

Levon Hawke, son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, does a good job of playing Jack. It’s not a brilliant performance, but a lot of that is probably, again, the damn script. You can see his potential.

Everyone else in The Thicket is just kind of there.

Jimmy Sue (Leslie Grace) is a total firecracker in the book, but rewritten into practically nothing for the movie. Maybe they thought two strong female characters was way too much?

The novelty of casting Metallica frontman James Hetfield fizzles due to his character’s lack of relevance. It feels like they concocted this deputy for him, when there was a perfectly good sheriff in the book (Winton) that would have been a great fit and was instead cut.

Gbenga Akinnagbe can’t be blamed for Eustace lacking lustre, either. I get that they probably didn’t want to focus on Eustace getting drunk all the time, because it wasn’t a good look for the only Black man they retained from the original story.

But without that nuance his character seems quite competent – although he’s only shown tracking once, late in the movie, so the rest of the time you have no idea what he brings to the group. And it makes NO sense that Reginald hands him a bottle of whiskey before the final fight, to turn him crazy. You don’t know that he goes crazy when he’s drunk, and then he’s not even shown going crazy!

And my biggest character beef: the omission of the pork, aka Eustace’s pet boar, Hog. Their relationship lent so much entertainment that was utterly missing from the movie.

Without giving the ‘good’ guys enough time to develop their relationships, show their dark sides, and reveal their backstories, we’re left with a more run-of-the-mill “gather a posse and save the princess” story, and that’s not what this was supposed to be.

I understand the choice to give Bill’s gang more scenes, especially with Juliette Lewis in the role. But removing so many critical plot points and all that character development really damaged the whole thing.

I didn’t hate The Thicket. I just wish I’d seen it before I read the book.

Then I wouldn’t be mad that they cut the entire river scene, which I was eager to see in CGI. I wouldn’t know that it could have been full of dark humour, great characters, and even more brutal killing. And maybe I wouldn’t have noticed that for a movie called ‘The Thicket’, there’s no damned thicket!

The production was shot entirely in Calgary, Alberta, and they opted to make it all take place in snow. Maybe the miserable darkness of Canadian winter was supposed to replace the foreboding of The Thicket, but it really doesn’t. I guarantee Texans are being as picky about the faux ‘Texas’ scenery and lack of a dense, lawless forest as I am about the plot holes.

You can’t spend a whole movie saying “we’re headed into The Thicket, nobody who goes in ever comes out,” and then not have a thicket. You just can’t.