- Title: Calamity Jane (2024)
- IMDb: link
A low-budget Western more notable for the reunion of Arrow stars Emily Bett Rickards and Stephen Amell than anything else, Rickards stars as Calamity Jane out for revenge after Wild Bill Hickock (Amell in pretty awful wig) is killed in a Deadwood saloon while she’s cooling her heels in a jail cell. After breaking out, Jane hunts down the man responsible (Primo Allon) who hires a crazy murderer (Priscilla Faia) and her brothers to provide protection on his way through the lawless Badlands.
After the murder of the sheriff (Mike Dopud), who the deputy (Tim Rozon) wrongly accuses Jane of despite some compelling circumstantial evidence pointing towards Jack (whose murderous nature killed an unarmed Bill from behind), the new sheriff puts together a posse to go after both fugitives until he decides to trust Jane and joins forces to bring the sheriff’s true killer to justice.
You can see what might have brought Rickards to the project playing a character like Jane, far removed from Arrow‘s Felicity Smoak. The trouble is, while she’s allowed to get into quite a few scrapes, and certainly holds her own, the film can’t ever really decide who this version of Calamity Jane is under her bluster and anger leaving a giant hole in the middle of the film with only its lackluster violence which is, at best, mostly movie-of-the-week quality, to fill it.
The gunfighting, which admittedly is nothing special, is still a good deal better than the film’s dialogue or attempts at drama. We get a few shoot-outs before the end, but at only 95 minutes, the film begins to drag long before its climax. Our deputy turned sheriff also keeps getting in the way of the revenge story, the film’s biggest selling point, unnecessarily limiting the amount of carnage and calamity Jane can dish out.
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