The Marksman (2021)

The Marksman arrives with the solemnity of a late-career Liam Neeson vehicle and the ambitions of a Sunday afternoon cable rerun. He plays Jim Hanson, a widowed rancher on the Arizona border, behind on his payments, accompanied by a dog that the screenplay will eventually sacrifice for our edification. A woman and her son cross the border fleeing a cartel. There is a shootout. The mother dies. Hanson, reluctantly at first and then with grim momentum, drives the boy toward Chicago. It is a road movie with a body count and a moral compass that points due north.

The film's cultural accounting is modest and largely incidental. Several Latino performers occupy significant roles, among them Jacob Perez as the boy, Teresa Ruiz as his mother, and Juan Pablo Raba as the enforcer who hunts them. Their presence is native to the border setting, not a statement, and the narrative still orbits a white man who discovers his humanity by protecting a child of color. Katheryn Winnick's border patrol agent and Ruiz's fleeing mother are supporting figures in a revenge story built around male grievance. The cartel supplies the villainy, which means no structural critique of wealth, no climate anxiety, no inquiry into identity, no interest in the body or the mind. The film has nothing to say and says it at highway speed.

None of this is a crime. It is a business decision. Critics were unmoved, audiences were satisfied enough, and the picture topped the domestic box office during a pandemic winter when almost nothing else was open. This is a film with no sermon in it, no lesson, no agenda beyond the reliable mechanics of an aging man with a rifle and a conscience. Its progressive sensibilities extend about as far as casting accurately for a border story. That is the whole of its cultural ambition. We file it accordingly, with a shrug and a stamp.