Whereas the Western was once a prominent go-to genre for movie studios from the 1920s through the 1970s, it has fallen out of favor through saturation and overuse, so that now we are lucky to get two, maybe three Western films in theaters over the course of a year. And unfortunately “Jane Got a Gun,” released in theaters now with zero fanfare or marketing from The Weinstein Company, will not be the movie to reverse this trend of get people excited about this genre again. An interesting idea of a story presented in a muddled non-linear fashion within the confines of an ultimately weightless movie, this is the kind of movie that makes for an okay watch on a rainy Tuesday night – simply a way to pass the time with some fine actors doing decent work in a film that just never comes together into something memorable.
Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman) lives with her daughter on a secluded piece of land somewhere in New Mexico, and one day her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich) comes home with bullet wounds all over his back. Jane tries her best to fix him up but he’s bed ridden, paralyzed from the waist down, and for some reason his vision is all blurry (may have been from the booze he was constantly drinking to numb the pain). He also has bad news, telling her that the Bishop Gang was coming for them. This causes Jane to panic a bit, so she hands off her young daughter to a friend for safe keeping, and then goes to her former lover Dan (Joel Edgerton) asking for his help as a gunslinger. He refuses at first, being drunk and bitter, but then acquiesces and agrees to help, while still being drunk and bitter.
