Main cast: Cam Gigandet (Elden Gallup), Chantelle Albers (Alice), Hannah James (Nora), Cord Newman (Grimes), David Midthunder (Lobo), Buck Taylor (Sheriff Cleetus), Luce Rains (Zek Daniels), Robert Woods (Brock Jaspers), Richard Gabai (Skyler Weston), Chip Mefford (Dobbs), Mohamed Karim (Tripp Walker), and Madeline Wilson (Effie O’Malley)
Director: Raliegh Wilson
People, I think Two Sinners and a Mule probably costs $200 to make. I have no idea what Cam Gigandet is doing here; maybe he made some heinous bargain with Satan to get a break in his career and now he has to do the bidding of hell by getting involved in as many brain-melting movies as possible—all part of the plan to unravel existence or something.
This is a Western movie. Alice and Nora are kicked out of a small town for the sin of selling happiness to men, if you know what I mean. No matter, they decide that they’d find their way to Virginia and open a restaurant there.
They stumble upon the bounty hunter Elden Gallup, who had been shot while he was staring up at an eagle in the sky and no, I’m not kidding about that one. The ladies have a plan. They’d use his expertise to nab the wanted criminal Grimes, and they can then take half the bounty and use that to get to Virginia!
One thing I quickly notice is that the entire thing is obviously shot on a film set, or maybe the venue for the local cowboy fair, I don’t know. What I know is that the whole thing looks very artificial. Even the costumes look like they had been recently brought out from the wardrobe department, because these costumes look too shiny and clean, like they’re being worn for the first time.
The lighting also feels very artificial, as is the whole color tone of the movie. The sunlight streaming from windows, for example, look off, resembling more like artificial lighting.
Once the movie moves to the great outside, my spider sense tingles and suggests to me that these people are just going around in circles in a single location.
Still, things won’t be so bad if the story and acting had been great, but sadly, everyone here puts on a performance as if they were gazing into the abyss and trying their best to convince themselves that this is the bottom of the barrel and things could only look up from this point.
Worse, the script has the two women acting like girl boss caricatures—one of them actually says, “You’re not the boss of me!”—that are loud and bossy, yet at the same time tragically incompetent. Meanwhile, Elden keeps getting shot at, and I have no idea why he doesn’t just go after that man that keeps trying to kill him. The whole thing seems like an unfunny gag, until it suddenly isn’t.
That’s another issue with this movie. It clumsily lurches forward like some unfunny comedy of errors, then at the last minute it tries to shove in heavier issues such as loss and grief. Well, that doesn’t work, as the characters are cardboard cutouts to the bitter end and I can’t be arsed to care about any of them.
I can be easily swayed to go easier on this clumsy showcase of amateurish incompetence since Cam Gigandet is always a pretty fellow to look at, but yikes, here they stuff him in some of ugliest and baggiest pants ever, and they only have him shirtless once. Once.
What is this? Do the people behind this show believe that they are making art? This movie needs plenty of violence and skin to make it work, as heaven knows it has nothing else going for it, but no. No gun-fu, no T&A, nothing. The fact that it has nothing, that it is nothing, tells me that the folks behind this thing may be tad delusional as well.
Anyway, this is a new low even for Mr Gigandet and really, this just won’t do. Get better, get naked, whatever—just don’t test me like this again.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mr Gigandet and Warren Kole in a road trip movie. Now.
