X
- 2016
- R
- Orion Pictures
- 1 h 30 m
- 2016
- R
- Orion Pictures
- 1 h 30 m
Summary A young Civil War veteran named Jackson (Scott Eastwood) wakes up to find his beautiful wife kidnapped by a band of ruthless bandits. With killers around every corner, the lines begin to blur between who the good and the bad are, including Jackson. As a final gunfight looms for our hero and he is asked to risk it all to save the woman he...
Directed By: Lawrence Roeck
Written By: Carlos De Los Rios, Lawrence Roeck
- 2016
- R
- Orion Pictures
- 1 h 30 m
- 2016
- R
- Orion Pictures
- 1 h 30 m
Diablo
35
2.1
Where to Watch
Summary A young Civil War veteran named Jackson (Scott Eastwood) wakes up to find his beautiful wife kidnapped by a band of ruthless bandits. With killers around every corner, the lines begin to blur between who the good and the bad are, including Jackson. As a final gunfight looms for our hero and he is asked to risk it all to save the woman he...
Directed By: Lawrence Roeck
Written By: Carlos De Los Rios, Lawrence Roeck
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 9 Critic Reviews
35
11% Positive
1 Review
1 Review
44% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
44% Negative
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 9 Critic Reviews
35
11% Positive
1 Review
1 Review
44% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
44% Negative
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
With his second feature, Roeck shows that he’s a talented and patient genre storyteller, even though his film’s rather flat cinematography and low budget doesn’t match his obviously more grandiose vision.
By the time the film works up to its finale, what secrets it wants to reveal to us have become fairly obvious. But they still carry a dark charge; Diablo’s ultimate grisliness is impressive in its own way. And it might have worked, had the film not asked entirely too much of its young lead.
User Score
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 23 User Ratings
2.1
13% Positive
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
9% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
78% Negative
18 Ratings
18 Ratings
User Score
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 23 User Ratings
2.1
13% Positive
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
9% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
78% Negative
18 Ratings
18 Ratings
The movie lost me during the first scene when Scott Eastwood fired his 30-30 rifle and it had absolutely NO recoil. That's a powerful rifle, enough to make your shoulder sore with a couple shots. He was firing off capgun shots that were so pathetic that I was immediately yanked out of the story. In the opening scene! This travesty to the the Western genre was repeated several times. I finally gave up about a third of the way into the story. Another oddity that really just didn't make any sense was the inordinate amount of screen time given to tying the horse to trees and bushes. Seriously? If the director was going for some serious realism, he should have started with his ridiculous toy popguns, not waste screen time on the reins.
And then there's the dialog. Wow. The actual moment I turned off the movie was that awkward scene where Jackson rides up on a Chinese guy working on his wagon (I recognize the actor but can't recall his name). He very strangely says, "My wife has been kidnapped. I HAVE TO GET HER BACK!"
That was just weird. Was there a decision about whether to rescue her? As if, he decided he needed to rescue her, but wasn't sure until he vocalized it right at that moment? Just too weird...
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Good cinematography, photography and production values are unfortunately heavily undermined by the one if the most amateurish and incompetent scripts to ever grace the silver screen. The resulting storytelling is abysmal, pacing is messy and even the actors clearly struggled to deliver their lines in a convincing manner. Sound effects felt really cheap, too.
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Veteran actors such as Danny Glover and Walton Goggins bring much-needed flavor to Diablo.
Without that sort of compelling figure at its center, Diablo feels far more like a pastiche than the real deal.
A violent and grimly obvious frontier thriller that Clint Eastwood might have made during his Spaghetti Days.
Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.
It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.
What is this movie?
Other than some really nice cinematography and an excellent Danny Glover performance, I don't know where to start with this...thing. About 20 minutes of the movie is just the main character riding around on a horse in the **** him and someone else in a standoff with no dialogue, which would be fine if I knew some sort of exposition to the other character to make me care for him. There wasn't. Except for Danny Glover, everyone in this movie could act about as well as a plank of wood. There was hardly any emotion, the facial expressions weren't right, and the actors looked as confused through the movie as I did. All characters weren't characters, but rather, plot elements to push the movie forward to the "twist" ending. This is when a boring, harmless Western movie turns into one of the worst Western movies ever.
The final thirty minutes of the movie are some of the most baffling and self-destructive I've ever seen. It all starts when (SPOILERS HERE: Even though you won't care, trust me) Carver is about to be killed by Ezra, the stalker guy that always follows Jackson. Before the camera pans at Carver's granddaughter, Ezra is about to kill him. However, when the camera pans looking out the window, Jackson is the one doing the killing, and Ezra is not found for the rest of the movie. I laughed my butt off all the way until Jackson reached a small village, where he murders everyone there, including a few children, for no reason other than to find Alexsandra. This is where I got angry. Because Jackson doesn't do anything morally wrong for the entire movie. Sure, he killed a few people, but at least he didn't shoot first. As soon as he confusingly kills Carver, he goes ape****. This wouldn't be bad, of course, if he had a reason to this. But nope, no explanation, just out of nowhere. That killed any potential the movie had, and it left me half asleep by the time Jackson actually makes the final battle. And I thought 'what if this movie turns out to be okay because of a bad*** last battle'. No. The entire thing was an ending relationship plot point inside a three minute standoff.
In other words, never watch this movie. If you're looking for a good, modern , Western movie, watch Django Unchained, not this pile of horsecrap.
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Awards
Alberta Film & Television Awards (AMPIA Awards)
• 1 Win & 4 Nominations
San Diego Film Festival
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
