Seeing Kentucky onscreen is usually a fraught experience for Kentuckians themselves. Do the filmmakers think Kentucky and Appalachia are interchangeable terms? How are the accents handled? Do they know gay people live here? Refugees? Thanks to generous tax credits, more and more films are being shot here in Louisville and around the state, meaning there are more opportunities to get the recipe right, to see a little bit of our real world on screen. As the crime vehicle Red Right Hand hits theaters this week, my eye is especially narrowed because it was shot in the rural place where I grew up – Henry County.
Starring Orlando Bloom (the star of another Kentucky based film Elizabethtown) as Cash, a reformed and now sober criminal who is mourning the loss of his sister while keeping an eye on her husband and daughter. Under threat of losing the family farm, he is pulled back into the rotten fold of the local crime syndicate, led by a vicious town baddie named Big Cat, played by Andie MacDowell. The Groundhog Day actress hails from South Carolina, so her accent goes down better than most, but alas, MacDowell is no Margo Martindale, Justified’s scheming Queenpin. Rather she is forcing an attitude to fit the script, not bringing a character to life, which is a shame, because Cat is a top-notch vicious, mean character. Sadly, Orlando Bloom is doing the same, and his brooding manner and macho declarations fall flat, though I appreciated that his scruff doesn’t look manicured. The script can be blamed for this, not delivering great lines for anyone, but the shortcomings are especially obvious because this film is blessed with two great actors who rescue their underwritten roles seemingly without effort. Garret Dillahunt (“Deadwood,” Winter’s Bone) is a preacher in recovery from booze and crime, all bald head and knowing eyes, wanders onscreen for 10 minutes and steals every scene. Scott Haze, the fearless actor who was amazing in the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, plays Cash’s drunk brother-in-law, managing to bring some gravitas to his suffering. Both of these actors raise above the cliches that built them.
Red Right Hand is a film that is an example of the collapse between television and cinema, showing an awareness of hit shows like “Yellowstone,” while also proudly calling back B-movie classics of the ’70s and ’80s. This is not an original story. It hits all the beats you would expect from a one-man army story, going back to Billy Jack and Shane. In many ways Red Right Hand is an old-fashioned crime thriller — gritty and, at times, nasty and bloody. The violence is sporadic and extreme, with scenes that made me squirm. A shame it doesn’t have more fun with the premise, or lean harder into the violence and venture into Dragged Across Concrete territory. It’s a solemn, overlong film, with almost no humor besides some stock characters whose wickedness is supposed to be funny, which is especially mind boggling because it is directed by the Nelms brothers. This dynamic duo brought the world Fatman in which Walton Goggins is hired by an evil rich kid to assassinate Santa Claus, played by a bitter and bedraggled Mel Gibson.
What Red Right Hand pulls off very well is creating an authentic Kentucky setting by, well, setting it in Kentucky. Home of Wendell Berry (not to mention a long line of Heightchews), Henry County is a rural spot without a Wal-Mart, relatively untouched by development though it’s only 40 minutes from Louisville up I-71. The filmmakers leaned into the ordinary surroundings of small town and rural life to create a lived in community on screen. I appreciate the care they took to show the unkempt, yet functional working farms, with disintegrating, unused silos, and barely there fences and dirt lanes. And yet, they took full advantage of the newly renovated courthouse in New Castle to create a stately town, and a new build McMansion to represent Cat’s status and corruption. I recognized the restaurant and storefronts. And I spent a lot of my childhood in farmhouses just like the one that this family lives in. There’s even a shootout at a lone trailer dropped in the middle of a field, surrounded by broken down cars that is as natural a landscape from my past as the trees and creeks.
But, characters claim to have “lost people to the hills,” referencing Appalachia without even a mound in sight, not even in the aerial shots. That’s a rookie move, a line pinched from Justified. It’s best not to listen to Red Right Hand, just look at it. It looks right, and for that I am grateful.
For a recent film that got Kentucky right on both levels, check out “The Starling Girl” on Hulu.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 12, 2024.