The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Watch Movies TV -***DISCLAIMER*** The following review is entirely my opinion. If you comment (which I encourage you to do) be respectful. If you don't agree with my opinion (or other commenters), that's fine. To each their own. These reviews are not meant to be statements of facts or endorsements, I am just sharing my opinions and my perspective when watching the film and is not meant to reflect how these films should be viewed. Finally, the reviews are given on a scale of 0-5. 0, of course, being unwatchable. 1, being terrible. 2, being not great. 3, being okay. 4, being great and 5, being epic! And if you enjoy these reviews feel free to share them and follow the blog or follow me on Twitter (@RevRonster) for links to my reviews and the occasional live-Tweet session of the movie I'm watching! With a name like Buster Scruggs, I would have thought his song would be a ragtime sort of ditty.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – 3 out of 5

I’ve enjoyed the Coen brothers' work for some time now and when I heard that they made an anthology western film for Netflix, I didn’t need to hear anything else.  I was on board with just the basic information.  Due to the holidays and regular run-of-the-mill insanity that comes with everyday living, I wasn’t able to watch this the moment it was uploaded to the streaming site but I finally caught The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and…well, I kinda found it underwhelming.

Not even the presence of Clancy Brown was enough to make me feel anything
more than "meh" towards the film.

Not many can pull off the white cowboy suit but TBN
does it.

This yarn from the Old West covers 6 different tales.  There’s Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), a singing outlaw with a blazing fast draw who realizes that there’s always someone faster.  There’s a cowboy (James Franco) who finds himself one-upped by a bank teller (Stephen Root) and now sees the noose in his future.  An Impresario (Liam Neeson) and his quadriplegic artist (Harry Melling) take up the third tale and focuses on how hard it is to make a living as a performer during the era.  In the fourth story, there’s gold in them thar hills and one lonely prospector (Tom Waits) is out to find it.  The fifth story centers around a young woman named Alice (Zoe Kazan) traveling across the plains on a journey to meet the man she is to marry.  Sadly, life out on the range is hard and misfortune is out to find her instead.  Finally, the last tale circles around an Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill), an Irishman (Brendan Gleeson), a Frenchman (Saul Rubinek), a devout Christian woman (Tyne Daly) and a rugged fur trapper (Chelcie Ross) who are all sharing a stagecoach to Colorado.  The share their thoughts and experiences they’ve all had on life but soon things take a turn when they learn who the Englishman and Irishman are and what their business is at their destination.

The noose is a metaphor for a noose that hangs you after you've committed crimes.
I'm not good with metaphors.

Anthology collections can be unique experiences to view and hard to review due to their structure.  Collected stories means finding the overall quality of the sum total of its parts is incredibly difficult.  Even worse, varying quality of the stories can end up having an adverse effect on the entirety.  As it concerns Buster Scruggs, I really wanted to like it more than I found myself liking it but since I found two of the stories to be lacking and impossible for me to engage with, I ended up feeling like the whole product was mediocre.

I'll be honest, I found the product to be mediocre but I still liked it more than
most Westerns I've seen in my life.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs starts out strong as hell.  The first four stories are amazing.  Well-crafted visually, the performances are outstanding and the stories were captivating.  Some were funny, some were engaging and intriguing and some were emotional and dramatic.  All of them, however, were very entertaining.  Sadly, the final two stories were where the film lost me.  The final story had some potential to grab me and I liked aspects of it but it felt like it was just meandering for too much of it.  This wandering feel is also seen in the fifth story and, to make matters worse, the fifth story centers around a woman—a type of character the Coens aren’t so good at writing for.  Having two bad stories in an anthology film isn’t bad in and of itself but these two stories came one right after another and I found them to be dragging and, honestly, incredibly boring.  Having the film end with these two tales tainted the entire product for me and I ended up walking away finding the ending feature to be average and middle-of-the-road.

I can't tell if my favorite story is the one that involves Tom Waits is because
I'm a huge fan of the man's music or because it legitimately is a great
story.

Anthology films can be very fun and wickedly creative.  There’s also a challenge because you need to establish characters, settings, and situations in a short amount of time and do so in a way that doesn’t feel like you are just being told what is happening.  I really wanted to like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs a lot more then I ended up liking it.  Most of it is totally amazing and extremely entertaining but some of it was just bad enough that it left an undesirable aftertaste.  When this movie is great, it’s funny and captivating but when this movie dipped, it dipped so deeply that it was extremely boring.  Even worse, when the product hits this low point it ended up staying there and there was nothing about it that was able to pull me back in.