Sweetwater (2013)

I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover (or a movie by the poster), but when I found “Sweetwater” (2013) in a second-hand store, I figured I’d give it a shot. It had Ed Harris, January Jones, Jason Isaacs! What a cast!
But: surprise surprise, this movie was unimpressive and kind of a letdown.

***

Set somewhere in the middle of the New Mexico Territory during the 1800s, Prophet Josiah (Jason Isaacs) was a cult leader who always dressed in all-black and was taking his time absorbing the nearby town into his cult, working bring it under the umbrella of his compound, “Holy Land.”

When idiot brothers Levi (Noah Miller) and Jacob (Logan Miller) got lost on their way from El Paso to Albuquerque, they killed a sheep the found so they could eat it. Unbeknownst to them, it was one of Josiah’s flock, and he retaliated by murdering them in cold blood. 

Turns out that the governor of Colorado had special interest in the brothers and sent Sheriff Jackson (Ed Harris) to investigate their disappearance. Meanwhile, dirt farmer Miguel (Eduardo Noriega) and his wife Sarah (January Jones) lived a simple life on a farm outside of town, barely scraping by with their meager crops. When Miguel saw sheep eating the sprouts, he confronted Josiah about keeping his flock in check. As Josiah was convinced that he was the second coming of Jesus, he had an ego the size of Texas and didn’t like being critiqued, so he murdered Miguel too. Then Josiah to convince Sarah into being one of his many wives; when she turned him down, he raped her.

Sheriff Jackson made himself known in town, being brusque and crude and largely an asshole, but he did figure out who killed the brothers and also deposed Sheriff Kingfisher (Luce Rains), the feckless sheriff of the town who was on Josiah’s payroll. For some reason, Ed Harris seemed to be channeling the same “wannabe thespian cop” role that Willem Dafoe used in his role as Detective Smecker in “Boondock Saints” (1999), which was almost enough to ruin my immersion.

Of course, being a western, the ending was bittersweet: everyone died in a shootout except Sarah, and technically the villain got what he deserved.

The soundtrack was mediocre – it was western-y, but nowhere as good as anything by Ennio Morricone.

As for special effects, I think everything was real except the bullets: actors rode horses, the dust was visibly dusty (fitting my own experience from living in New Mexico), and every single building looked like it was actually fabricated out of wood and iron nails.

***

Now, here’s where things get weird:

In the sleepy town of Sweetwater in the frontier west, a pretty blonde woman lived a quiet life on a farm until a murder turned her reality upside down. Flashbacks revealed she’d been a prostitute in a previous life, and the murder brings all that horror back. Then a lot of people died. A man in black caused all the trouble and someone was played by Ed Harris.

That paragraph succinctly described “Sweetwater,” but also the first season of “Westworld” (2016-2022). When I watched this movie, I thought it was a shitty cash-grab following Westworld’s initial success… until I went to IMDB to realized that this movie came out three years prior to Westworld’s pilot.

Did Jonathan Nolan watch “Sweetwater” in 2013 and use that as his inspiration for his show?!

The world will never know.

Anyway.

2 Claws for being a tolerable watch, but only really worth your time to kill on a plane.
”Westworld” was more engaging and “3:10 to Yuma” was a better western.