The Last Rites of Ransom Pride (2010) Reviews

• Miserably bad.

  lewiskendell2010-10-27

  "The body of Ransom Pride belongs to me." It didn't take me very long to realize that I wasn't going to enjoy The Last Rites of Ransom Pride. Ten minutes, at most. The whole vibe of the movie just turns me off. I like Lizzy Caplan, but putting one appealing actress in the middle of a disaster doesn't do much good. I disliked the way it was filmed, the dialogue, and the absurd, meandering, nonsensical narrative that served as the story. Basically, Ransom Pride (the man) is a recently dead acquaintance of Juliette Flower (Caplan), and she made a promise to retrieve his body and bury it near his mother. In order to get his body, she has to deliver Ransom's still living younger brother to some seedy folks. Lots of people hate her, lots of people want her dead, and lots of people try to stop her. That's the story. There are lots of unlikeable characters that were utterly ridiculous in their seriousness, the frequent action scenes are terrible, and the entire movie makes little sense. Sounds like a real winner, right? It's rare for me to truly hate a movie, but The Last Rites of Ransom Pride reached that dubious achievement. This is probably in the bottom two or three movies that I've seen this entire year. The only good news is that I (hopefully) don't have to ever watch it again.   

• Last Rites of director's film career hopefully.

  DevastationBob-32010-10-10

  It cost me a dollar to rent this and I have to say it's the worst use I've ever put a dollar to. To think I could have put that as a down payment on a pack of gum or just turned Washington's head into a mushroom. But no, I had to rent the interminable Last Rites of Ransom Pride. It begins with a voice-over telling us of Juliette's(Lizzy Kaplan)sad childhood and how she had to kill an evil general in his sleep. It's not a terribly long opening narration, and then we're hit with the oddly fonted subtitles telling us it's 11 years later, 11 years after she told us the voice-over or the actual events, we can only guess. By the way, the subtitles are very hard to read, which is unfortunate because they're used quite often. Other than the little bit of back story we get, the characters aren't particularly deep. Lizzy Kaplan pretty much keeps one expression on her face for the entire flick and Dwight Yokam calls her whore a lot, but that might not have been in the script. Peter Dinklage does as well as he can with the material, but despite this contribution, his character is simply named "Dwarf" in the credits. Don't seem right. A lot of what follows is intermittently plastered with instant replays of previous scenes and "artsy" shaky cam shots of animal skulls and birds that jerk like they're in a Tool video. These don't really add anything to the film and only serve to prolong the misery of watching it. It's not a terribly complicated story either, but Tiller sure takes the scenic route getting us there. It's like he's slowly winding a broken jack in the box. You want the weasel to pop, but you know it never will. If you like westerns I wouldn't suggest seeing this, and if you don't like westerns, I still wouldn't.

• Pee-yoo!

  elmoworx2011-07-04

  Another in a long line of pretentious Canadian films. Too often, I see Canadian film makers who think they have to display all manner of pseudo-intellectual, artsy nonsense in order to convince the viewer that the Canadian movie experience is more cerebral and enlightening than those gauche, low-brow US movies. Harumph! And yet they borrow every US-based visual trick to make their films. The result is a lurching Frankenstein monster that sends me running for my torch light and pointed stick. This movie is visually ugly, with jerky cutaway shots that make me think they are trying to do a style job a la Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Coppola shows us how it's done when done well; sorry guys, but you show us what it looks like when done badly. This could have been a beautiful, interesting Western if they'd have stuck to some of the more traditional elements of the genre. I'm thinking something along the lines of "The Assassination of Jesse James..." Obviously, they didn't have a Brad Pitt budget, but my opinion is that they wasted too much cash on the unnecessary visual junk. And speaking of cash, I imagine the constraints of Canadian government funding also put the strangle-hold on their efforts. There is little funding to be had for Canadian art unless it screams pretentiousness and faked intellectualism. You want to know something? When I watched this one on Netflix, I never knew it was Canadian by its description. It was listed as a Western and I love Westerns, so I picked it out. Two minutes into it, I had it pegged as a Canadian film. Go figure. And in case you're wondering, I am Canadian, myself, and I do like some Canadian flicks. "The Saddest Music in the World" is one of my faves. It shows that you can be quirky without being a snob about it. That is a FUN movie, filmed (in an old warehouse in Winnipeg) with Vaseline smeared on the camera lenses. Nothing high-brow or snooty, here, folks! HA HA HA!! Ahem...back to the review. The characters in this one are unpleasant. Dwight Yoakam is fun to watch, but he can't carry such a heavy load on his shoulders alone. I'm not going to lay out the details of bad characters - suffice to say there was no character that I could root for, or get behind, or cheer for! In the long run, I guess it's all about personal taste, so I would never tell a person to pass this one by. The fact that people made this movie (presumably with some enthusiasm) is testimony that SOMEONE out there is interested in this type of thing. But it ain't me, Babe. No, no, no...it ain't-- Well, you get the idea. Be forewarned, is all. It's called a Western, but doesn't feel like one. Not by a long shot. It feels like you're standing in an allegedly upscale museum, where people are expected to praise every splatter and smear simply because they've been told that it's art. I don't consider my tastes to be low-brow. I am fully capable of appreciating cerebral works. Actually, I enjoy movies of all genres. The only thing I ask is that it entertains me. Entertains my eyes, my ears, my imagination. This one did none of those things.

• I've never felt this way about a film before

  MBunge2012-03-30

  Well, that was a first. I was tired of watching this movie before the opening credits were over. Out of all the torturous, infuriating, depressing and defective cinema I have seen, nothing ever sucked so fast, so hard as The Last Rites of Ransom Pride. Fortunately, the rest of the film wasn't any worse that the very beginning or I would have had to garrote myself with a strand of dental floss. What the remaining inept mess did make me feel like doing is weeping for the future. There have always been terrible motion pictures but it used to be that the folks who made them knew what they were doing, they were just really bad at it. Now we get rubbish like this where the people who made it don't even know how to tell a story. They don't know how to construct a character. The don't know how to structure a plot. They don't know how to craft dialog. All they know how to do is copy what they've seen others do on screen without understanding any of it. It's like a chimp imitating a human…except the chimp is really, really stupid. Let's start with those opening credits. Imagine every excessively edited montage you've ever seen, the worst bits of every horrendous music video to ever see the light of day, and multiply that by 2. Then you'll have some idea of how irritating these opening credits are. They'll make you want to physically assault the person who put them together for being so insultingly clichéd. As for the story, a guy you won't care about (Scott Speedman) gets killed in Mexico in 1911. A girl you won't care about (Lizzy Caplan) agrees to buy back his body in exchange for the guy's brother (Jon Foster), who you also won't care about. The father of the two guys you won't care about (Dwight Yoakum) is kind of interesting, but only because he's played by Dwight Yoakum. As the girl and the brother you won't care about ride down South, the father and two others guys you won't care about (W. Earl Brown and Jason Priestly) follow. Not together, of course, because that might make some sense. No, the father and the two other guys travel separately, though they seem to take the same route. Maybe Yoakum insisted he share as little screen time as possible with Priestly. The girl and the brother you won't care about run into some other people you won't care about (Peter Dinklage, Blu Mankuma and the Quijada brothers) and eventually hatch a scheme to steal back the corpse of that first guy you didn't care about. That plot is foiled when the father shows up and that leads to the girl and the brother having a final showdown with him. Now, since the father is built up as the main villain through the entire film up to that point, you'd think such a battle would signal the end of the movie. Wrong! The Last Rites of Ransom Pride keeps going after killing its only interesting character and, instead, brings in yet another guy you don't care about (Kris Kristofferson) to have yet another showdown with the girl and the brother you won't care about. And that's the worst example in this whole pitiful production of how these filmmakers don't even know to tell a story. How can you not save the final battle with the father for the ending climax of the movie? How can you think bringing in a replacement at the end is going to work? I'm not even going to get into the laughable way they try to tie the final battle of the girl you won't care about with some other chick you won't care about together with this film's backstory prologue. And while all of that nonsense in going on, you're visually battered by cutaways, flashbacks, flash forwards and other editing/narrative digressions that you've seen a jillion times before, but which are apparently supposed to be improved here through sheer mass tonnage. From Lizzy Caplan using a grand total of one expression and one inflection for the entire flick, to wondering how much Scott Speedman wishes he'd been in the 3rd Underworld sequel instead of this thing, to realizing that even someone as talented at Peter Dinklage has to probably take every part he's offered because there just aren't that many roles for a little person, The Last Rites of Ransom Pride is a parade of discouraging failure. A stubbed toe is more entertaining than this thing because at least the pain doesn't last for over 80 minutes. Don't just skip it. Vault over it.

• A true Gem

  xultunwaye-883-9217332010-10-28

  The people who gave this a bad review clearly do not understand the B rate movie genre. I stumbled upon this little gem by accident and really liked from the start. By 10 minutes in I was on the edge of my seat wondering what the director was going to do next. I'm not going to spoil this by providing plot clues and tidbits about exciting scenes. I'm just going to give my impression and let you decide for yourselves. This movie is well casted. The script isn't awful. The cinematography is gripping. The story line is fitting of the genre. The acting is OK. Suspend disbelief for a few moments, just remember that it's B Rate, and enjoy it for what it is.