or, “Sex Appeal Don’t Surf”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.
1.5 out of 5
“Wild Horses” (aka WH) is enigmatic. That there’s city talk fer a jumbleberry of arthouse monkeyshines. It’s a great big horse apple. It stinks.
Like other actors of his generation, the late Robert Duvall had a ‘thing’, and – like De Niro & Pacino – that thing was getting flustered & shouting. You can almost guarantee that having Duvall in a movie, even in a supporting role, will result in a show-stopping on-screen freak-out. Viewers are assured that WH’s is a doozy.
Otherwise, it follows the blueprint of Duvall’s first filmmaking effort “The Apostle”, in that halfway through, there’s a narrative moment that gives away the film’s intentions (here, it’s at a Will reading).
After a few days mulling it over, I’m pretty sure WH is about how any discourse in modern femininity disrupts the largely-male mythos of the cowboy. I reckon.
But things start out as a redemption saga, about Duvall’s aging rancher coming to terms with one son’s homosexuality. The film takes so much time building up this particular plot – as well as that of a female Texas Ranger sucked into local corruption – that it can’t shake the stallions when the real focus of the second half should be the mares.
*
Angie Cepeda’s housekeeper Maria becomes a key player, only to disappear in the home stretch. Shouldn’t she have been the one to help with the body? Why is there a lengthy scene of the brothers clobbering homophobes when the audience already knows they support one another? What was Bob thinking?
As Ranger Sam, Duvall’s widow Luciana Pedraza is a well-defined audience surrogate. Sadly for us, she’s saddled with perfunctory action (from car chases, to busting up drug deals), and other moments that seem cooked specifically to showcase ‘a good looking woman’ instead of the film’s thesis of the ‘strong modern cowgirl’. She should have been swept up in the mystery instead.
Whether additional footage exists to have fleshed out Maria’s time at the estate, we may never know (it mustn’t have been easy to grow up around four chuds). What I do declare, is that any sibling material worth its salt after the Will reading is just some darn hootenanny.
*
Regardless of Duvall’s thematic intentions, whether being a reflection of the past or future, his Wild Horses is the squeaky-wheel to the grease of The Apostle. Leave this little house on the prairie.
//wd 7.12.2026
Poster sourced from impawards.com. Screenshot from Universal Pictures Germany. As of publication, “Wild Horses” is available to view in Western Canada on Amazon Prime (unsponsored link).
theory of a daskeman 