The Devil in Sanctuary City Forever young / Will not grow old - 6.5
Modern Western. As I like to say over and over again, Western is not a genre. This is an archegenre defined by place and time, and even then rather conditionally. Yellowstone is also a western, although the action takes place in the 21st century. Well, the Red Ghost is quite made according to the canons of the Western, although what is happening is not suitable either in time or place. Or "Cowboys vs. Aliens." Or the magnificent "Mandalorian" - one hundred percent Western. But in general, the action of the classic western takes place on the Great Plains of the United States from the middle to the end of the 19th century, during the Frontier, the Civil War, or the confrontation between pastoralists and farmers.
But inside this genre field, anything can happen - historical epics, musicals, comedies, social dramas, pure action movies, romantic stories, horrors, thrillers, philosophical parables and all that. This also applies to the modern western, the example of which is the film Forever Young.
The masterpiece of the film can not be called, although the rating of both the KP and the IMDB is clearly underestimated. The plot is simple. In a small town run by a Christian community led by a demonic pastor who forbade all sins in the town, an Irishman Patrick lives with his French wife. His pastor banned his business as sinful and now he is interrupted by the earnings of an undertaker, dreams of leaving for California, but his wife does not want to leave the poor, but still acquired good and a house.
Everything changes when a trio of bounty hunters, led by the Dutchman Albert, appears in the town performed by the creepy-looking Cusack. The trio is strange - they seem to be looking for a criminal, but the bandos themselves are weaker, one without a tongue, the second speaks only Spanish. The trio decides to stay in the city, open a pub with a brothel and very quickly plunge the town of Svyatosh into a sinful hole mired in vice.
But Patrick's things go uphill, because the corpses multiply exponentially. For some reason, the locals begin to associate him with the trinity and begin to accuse him of all sorts of crap. Not far behind the locals and the wife, who now wants to quickly leave and the house she no longer needs. In the finale, Patrick will have to choose a side and fight evil.
It seems that the plot, although uncomplicated, is quite popular and you could build a good story on it. But it doesn't work here. Perhaps the fact is that this Western is shot in co-production of a bunch of countries, among which the United States is not. And therefore, the creators could not breathe into the film the spirit of the Western. It was a dark and purely European movie.
In addition, the creators shot a metaphor film, an allegory film about the descent into the American hinterland of infernal evil, the Devil himself with his henchmen who destroy the town inhabited by saints, personifying America. But the authors could not achieve either a ringing note or a subtlety of sound. All the moves and artifacts are too head-on, too straightforward, and even vulgar, like the pastor burning a tavern, the nest of sin, with the visitors and roaring over the conflagration, the American “stripentharz” or the innocent girl brought into a brothel by a desperate mother who was “innocently” hanged for the murder of the first client. "Execution and weeping" - sorry, but it's so common.
In general, the film does not cause rejection and clearly does not deserve a rating of less than 6, but no more precisely.