Mark Reviews Movies: MURDER AT YELLOWSTONE CITY

Murder at Yellowstone City, RLJE Films

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | June 23, 2022

Eric Belgau never quite decides the focus or intent of his screenplay for Murder at Yellowstone City, and for a while, that fact almost doesn't matter. The movie tries to do a lot of things, to operate in a couple of modes, and to share the wealth among its somewhat sizeable cast of characters. What's intriguing, though, is that all of those things, modes, and characters possess some degree of merit. While the unfocused nature of all of these elements may not form a cohesive whole, the sum of the movie's parts almost creates something worthwhile.

The lack of concentration might be best displayed by the movie's inability or unwillingness to choose a main protagonist amongst its central characters. To be sure, the prime candidate seems to be a mysterious man named Cicero (Isaiah Mustafa), who rides through the plains and hills outside the eponymous town like so many mysterious men of the West before him.

The year is 1881, and the place is Montana. Cicero is a Black man with a past at which we can certainly make an educated guess, on account of the year and the general sense of his age.

There's still a puzzle to him, though, and his arrival here. What is he looking for, and what will he do when—as things in Westerns featuring strangers who wander into a town must—everything goes wrong? For his part, Mustafa shows just the right stoicism and swagger for this archetype, while the matter of Cicero's race definitely adds a layer of tension and, when the inevitable mess occurs, some note of prejudice on the part of some of the folks here—as underdeveloped as that latter concept may be.

At first, though, everything seems to be going fine for Yellowstone City and its populace—or, at least, it's about to get better for the place and its people. The town used to be a hub for mining, but then, the mine collapsed, a lot of people lost work, and about half the town left for other opportunities. Just about the time that Cicero is riding into town, a local prospector named Dunnigan (Zach McGowan) finds a lode of gold in them there hills. The prospector rides into town, too, making a scene of all the gold he has found. The town is about to boom again, but several people seem to cock their eyes with menace.

What you're certainly thinking will happen here, on account of the prospector's boasting and the title, does happen, indeed. Before the gold-finder's preordained murder by the pistol and knife of an anonymous and shadowy figure, Belgau and director Richard Gray give us a lay of the land and a good amount of information about various inhabitants of the town.

Among the central ones, we have Thaddeus (Thomas Jane), the local reverend, and Ambrose (Gabriel Byrne), the local Sheriff and a grieving widower. When Dunnigan is murdered, the Sherriff assumes Cicero is the killer, leaving our apparent protagonist in a cell or on the run for most of the story.

Meanwhile, the preacher and the lawman get into some debates between the righteousness of the truth and the justification for "law and order." Thaddeus more or less becomes the main character here. He's a man with a past even more mysterious than Cicero's, who becomes a sort of freelance detective looking into the case of Dunnigan's murder, as well as the other murders that result from someone or some people trying to cover his, her, or their tracks.

Each element of this story—the town's economic insecurity, the murders, the investigation into the killings—and these characters—the pastor with a regretted history, the overly determined Sherriff, the unjustly accused stranger who comes between them and has his own idealistic goal, as well as a pragmatic way of looking at the world—holds and, to some degree, shows some promise. The murder mystery is engaging, if a bit too narrow in its scope of possible suspects, and the three-way dynamic between Thaddeus, Ambrose, and Cicero possesses some potential in how each character's tragic past has come to define the very different people they are now.

Instead of concentrating on those elements, though, Belgau also introduces a slew of other characters, each one with some terrible past and/or goal for the future. Some of them include the Sherriff's son Jim (Nat Wolff), who's a bit reckless at the poker table and wants to prove himself as something, and Alice (Anna Camp), the preacher's wife who's better at ministering to the townsfolk. We also have Emma (Scottie Thompson), the prospector's widow who comes to resent the town, and a collection of sex workers at the local saloon, including the dead prospector's favorite and wannabe school teacher Isabel (Aimee Garcia), as well as saloon owners Edgar (Richard Dreyfus) and Mickey (John Ales), who are more than business partners.

There are more, too, but as one can tell, it's already becoming a bit too much for this material, which dismisses most of its setup in the end with a well-staged but overly extended shootout. There's an undeniable ambition to the scope of personalities within Murder at Yellowstone City, but ultimately, that ambition gets in the way of a potentially cracking mystery and a more restrained character study.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray