Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe go Depression-era rugged in The Weight, an old-school survival thriller about convicts carrying gold through Oregon. It’s in UK cinemas now, and it’s worth the ticket.
Every few years someone makes a film that feels as if it fell out of a 1970s double bill, and I fall for it like a man spotting a decent pub on a motorway. The Weight is this year’s one. It has convicts, gold, a rope bridge you wouldn’t cross for money and Ethan Hawke looking like he’s slept in a ditch since Easter.
It’s a story about men lugging heavy things through a forest. That sounds like a description of my last house move. Luckily it’s a lot more gripping than that.
It’s 1933, deep in the Great Depression. Samuel Murphy (Hawke) is a widower and war veteran who has been taken from his daughter and sent to a brutal prison labour camp in the Oregon wilderness. While he’s inside, the state is getting ready to put his girl up for adoption. Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) knows this, and makes him an offer. If Murphy smuggles gold out of a remote mine with a crew of dangerous fellow prisoners, he gets his freedom. That means several days on foot through country that wants them dead.
That’s the set-up, and I won’t say any more. The crew don’t trust each other, the woods aren’t empty, and gold is very heavy. You can probably guess the rest of the mood.
Hawke gives the kind of performance that seems to hurt. He’s gruff and low-voiced, a beaten man who has one reason left to keep going. Crowe has the smaller part and plays it with relish. Clancy is sly and charming in a way that makes you want to count your fingers after shaking his hand. Coming soon after Crowe’s run of heavies, it shows that nobody does quiet menace with a full stomach quite like him.
The supporting cast earn their keep too. Austin Amelio is wiry and twitchy as Rankin, the crew member you’d least want behind you on a cliff path. Avi Nash plays the thoughtful Singh, and Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen is the gentle young Olson. Julia Jones stands out as Anna, a resourceful cook who ends up on the journey. This is Padraic McKinley’s first feature as director, from a script by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines. It runs 112 minutes and the UK rating is 15.
It’s not reinventing anything. It’s just doing an old job properly, which these days is rarer than gold.
The best thing about The Weight is how physical it feels. You feel the mud, the cold and every bar of gold in every pack. The action scenes are few and well spaced, and the rope bridge sequence is brilliant if you hate heights. Period films can look like a heritage-centre gift shop, but this one feels lived in, and the brooding score suits it.
The flaw is the middle. Once the trek is under way, the film settles into a trudge that’s a little too close to what the characters are going through. The tension between the men keeps it going, but there are stretches where you’ll notice the pace is wilderness speed, not multiplex speed. The film is also very sure of itself, and it doesn’t do surprises in the way a modern thriller would. Whether that’s a plus or a minus depends on how much you miss films that just get on with it.
The critics have mostly been very kind. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 94 per cent from 143 reviews, Metacritic gives it 70, and IMDb users rate it 7.5. In the UK, Kevin Maher gave it four stars out of five in The Times. Screen Daily called it as “bluntly effective as the primitive weapons employed in this bare-knuckle saga”. Deadline’s headline at Sundance said, simply, “Pure Gold”.
Not everyone was won over. The Hollywood Reporter thought the film “Undersells Its High Stakes”. The San Francisco Chronicle said Hawke and Crowe can’t fully carry a thriller that “sags through its long middle”. I agree with that last point, but not enough to put anyone off.
The Weight is showing in UK cinemas now, rated 15. No streaming release in the UK has been announced yet. For now, if you want to see it, you’ll need a cinema seat and probably an overpriced bag of Revels. Honestly, that suits it. This is a film about big landscapes and men slowly falling apart, and it looks better on a big screen than on a laptop balanced on the ironing board.
The Weight is a sturdy, grimy, old-fashioned survival thriller with a terrific lead performance and a Russell Crowe turn that’s worth the ticket. It plods through the middle, and it never really surprises you. I think it’s perfect for a midweek cinema trip with a mate who still talks about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or anyone who grew up on Sorcerer and Deliverance and wishes Hollywood still made films like them. If you need a twist every ten minutes, or you think two hours of men sweating in a forest sounds like a camping holiday you’ve already been dragged on, skip it and wait for something with a car chase.
The Weight – 2026 – In cinemas – Cast includes:
Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio
Images from TMDB. Streaming data from JustWatch.
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