THE LAST RODEO - Mark Reviews Movies

The Last Rodeo, Angel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 22, 2025

Neal McDonough, the star and co-writer of The Last Rodeo, would have made quite the movie cowboy back in the day. This movie opens with the actor's steely gaze under a cowboy hat as his Joe Wainright steadies himself for a bull riding competition, and the character spends the rest of this story, which is incorrectly and strangely about the sport instead of the actual heart of the matter, with the same degree of grit, focus, and determination.

The conceit of the screenplay, also written by director Jon Avnet and Derek Presley, is that Joe, a man in his 50s, will return to the ring a couple decades after a career-ending injury, struggles with alcoholism and other addictions, and the death of his beloved wife for one last rodeo. This isn't an endeavor of ego or stubbornness or needing to prove to himself that he's not as washed-up as everyone believes him to be, however. No, he needs some of the prize money—not for himself but for his grandson, who is diagnosed with a brain tumor.

There's a bigger conversation the movie should be having with that setup. For whatever reason, it instead falls back on some predictable clichés of the sports-movie variety and a few others that have to do with the fact that, as the star puts it during one of those ticket-sharing calls to action that are now the standard for this particular distributor, this is a story about faith. We might buy that description, too, if not for the script's inability to be about anything significant with any real substance.

The faith angle comes primarily from one character: Joe's old colleague, coach, and friend Charlie Williams (Mykelti Williamson), a man who faced professional and personal doubts of his own but found comfort in Christianity. That's fine, of course, especially since Joe is dealing with grief and fears that even more will come soon. This story, though, isn't about faith even on its surface, since it's only discussed whenever Charlie is on screen. However this script was assembled, the end result is a bunch of ideas put together in a piecemeal fashion.

The most glaring issue with it, though, is the basic premise. Joe has found some return to as happy a life as possible after losing his wife, his career, and the physical capacity to do a lot of what he used to do. After the wife's death, Joe started drinking a lot, got on a bull while drunk, and was injured to such an extreme that his teenage daughter had to give up pretty much everything to become his full-time caretaker.

Since that low point, he now has a good, if occasionally tense, relationship with his adult daughter Sally (Sarah Jones) and is a doting, supportive grandfather to her son Cody (Graham Harvey). The boy wants to follow his grandfather's path to bull riding, which is the one thing that comes between Joe and Sally at the moment, but it's not as if Joe is encouraging his grandson to follow in his footsteps, since he knows all too well what can happen in the sport.

The characters and some grounded conflict are set up well here, and then, Cody is rushed to urgent care, after receiving a concussion from playing baseball, and, later, to a hospital in Dallas. There, a doctor tells Sally and Joe that the boy has a brain tumor, and someone in charge of billing informs the pair that the necessary surgery to remove it will cost anywhere between $75,000 and $150,000—even with medical insurance.

Coincidentally, there's a bull riding tournament that coming weekend in Tulsa, so Joe asks Charlie to help him prepare and be by his side. If Joe wins, the prize will pay for the surgery, and at this point, the whole story is starting to sound like the absolute nightmare that the health care industry in the United States is, has been for decades, and will, it seems, always be for the foreseeable future.

Instead of confronting any of that head on, though, the rest of the movie sticks to Joe in his unlikely return to bull riding, having to deal with the demons and regrets from his past, and a lot of really incongruent bits of sporting conflict and politics, as well as some humor about how improbable his return to the sport is. There are moments when The Last Rodeo comes across as if it has forgotten that this is about a man's desperate, dangerous plan to save his grandson's life. Perhaps, that's because to address that in any meaningful way would run counter to the movie's message that faith and family are enough. Here, that idea feels naïve in the face of the cruel realities of this premise.

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