“You have to learn to embrace blood if you want to live in these hills,” is how Andie MacDowell who plays an Appalachian drug lord Big Cat, puts it before one of her henchmen feeds the sheriff’s deputy to her dogs. This is but the typical dime store novel atmosphere the film “Red Right Hand” has. The movie is by novice screenwriter Jonathan Easley whose sentiments are echoed in the movie’s directors Ian and Eskom Nelms who made “Small Town Crime” back in 2017.
The crime drama set in Kentucky features the British actor Orlando Bloom as Cash, an ex-drug addict who comes with a distinctive feature a scar on his palm, thanks to his previous association with Big Cat and his gang. He is trying to focus on things that matter more than drugs his family, unfortunately, built only around one sister who died tragically due to drugs. Given Squaw Mountain holdings, he manages to co cultivate the lands with his drunkard brother-in-law Finney (played by Scott Haze) and niece Savannah (the role is taken by a young American actress, Chapel Oaks).
However, this is a Hollywood film, and their past is something that they can never escape regardless of how hard they try. Cash, an ex junkie himself, tries to avoid conflict until Big Cat dispatches her men to seek vengeance on his family following the $100k loan issue Finney had with him. Big Cat is an empire builder, and money is not sufficient for her. Thus, it is only logical for Cash to employ his particular set of skills: he is a relationship guru and has a license to kill literally. Cash soon realizes that he is tasked with guaranteeing Big Cat’s dynasty. A plethora of violent drug trades, threats, and violence follows. Given how dicey deals are, Cash and Finney ensure that Savannah is trained properly in using weapons.
Orlando does his best to push the envelope and be credible at all times, but the elements of fiction are outweighing realism as the gentle mannered Cash repeatedly boasts toned arms with tattoos only to pull up his strong frame on the oven door of his own porch.
You can observe the performing, not the actual existence. This would not have been a problem if Bloom was looking to anything but realism. That is, he could play a more exaggerated version of it all. One can brood sincerely at times, but that sort of blood-drenched epic has to have more than that.
This is the point when Garret Dillahunt, who plays an ex-gang member and junkie turned preacher, a fellow ex-junkie who goes by the name Wilder, manages to clinch the win. Dillahunt goes for broad strokes and even broader speeches. Only in this situation can a scene inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the eponymous subject of the film, be approached as the untamed speech of Preacher Harry Powell’s biblical chaos in The Night of the Hunter, that is arguably the best of Southern fried pulp.
MacDowell also reached St. MacDowell, performing her best shots during those years. From her large red brick house with a roaring fireplace, built-in oak bookcases, and leather armchairs, Big Cat ruled her empire. She is the kind of bad with whom men who crossed her are iron thumbed by their shears, and who hereafter uses the limp bodies of her aides for physical satisfaction. And MacDowell relished every single word. Sitting straight on the chairs, MacDowell understands how a southern woman uses a calm tone and decency to sweeten a threat. Arsenic unsurprisingly flows within her blood.
It’s a pity however, that her vicious goons don’t seem all that menacing as they sing and gyrate around like a band on stage rather than vicious killers. They are all too well-groomed with their beards carefully styled and their clothes, properly tailored. Whatever happened to such character actors as Jack Elam or Warren Oates any more, who had the craggy features and tough, rough lives that portrayed these characters?
At least sparks the most recognizable thick-rimmed harshness to his vision, cinematographer Johnny Derange which is saw in the color tones of high contrast night scenes with orange and teal highlights, find the Revival style. So soon towards the end of the work started, when approximately half the screen allotted dark time, this was done in order to achieve the required aesthetics to the above rightly so. That is to say you get a clear image of the actors’ faces, especially rare in modern cinema as far as recently seen.
Sadly, where bloom should shine, the final climatic shootout, he is absent for the majority of the time. While Savannah applies her new gun techniques and the to preacher confronts Big Cat, poor directing attempts unsuccessfully to show the face of Bloom, who stands in the same Common Room trying to see within the actress’s back again. This scene is too horrible to be true. Bloom was however not consistent and the efforts of the filmmakers to integrate him into the narrative can only charm fools.
At this stage of the film, it seems the filmmakers had come to this conclusion concerning Dillahunt and MacDowell’s characters; they totally interpret the essence of the picture. It is not even very surprising since these two heroes are best able to embody the main idea of the picture the American dream Revolves around God, family, guns, drugs and money.
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