For Ethan Hawke, 2025 was quite the year, showing impressively jarring range as both a bitter gay lyricist in Blue Moon and a demonic child-killer in Black Phone 2, both out at the same time in cinemas, a uniquely terrifying double-bill for diehards. He also led critically adored new noir series The Lowdown, airing simultaneously, all serving as reminder of how he’s one of the hardest-working established actors we have, not many five-time Oscar nominees have made eight films in the last four years (while also directing two other films on the side).
It doesn’t all hit (Raymond and Ray, anyone?) but there’s something unusually invigorating about someone with his level of fame still seeming so excited about the many different opportunities he can maximise (this is, after all, the guy who made millions from his crafty back-end deal for The Purge). He’s on far safer ground, at least as an actor, in The Weight, a conventional adventure drama about gold smuggling in the early 1930s, but his increased versatility has earned him an increase in confidence and while the work here might err more on the physical, he easily anchors the film.
One imagines the character might have been a little younger in the script, 55-year-old Hawke playing a widow with a seven-year-old who details his heroic exploits in the war. It’s Oregon in 1933, four years after the Great Depression started, and Murphy (Hawke) is finding it hard to put his impressive set of skills to use, struggling to provide for his daughter (British Hollyoaks actor Avy Berry). After they’re evicted and a scuffle with police sends him to a labor camp, he’s determined to get back to her as soon as possible, with just a limited amount of time before she’s officially adopted. His stern yet fair new boss (Russell Crowe, a small book-ending role) sees in him a talent that can be exploited and he recruits him to help shift some gold for associates of his. It’s just weeks away from an amnesty – all gold to be sent to the government – and mines are getting robbed by those desperate enough. Murphy will work with three men of his choice from the camp and two men from the mine to transport the gold to safety, a perilous and long journey through the wilderness.
We’re in charmingly old-school territory here (Paul Newman vehicles have been referenced in promo interviews), an unpretentiously direct matinee movie told without much seasoning added on top. It’s not the kind of traditional dad favourite one always expects at Sundance (it feels far more suited to a mass-market festival like Toronto) but it’s a small-budgeted attempt to make a big movie, an independent spirit the festival likes to reward. Padraic McKinley, a director whose work has been small screen-based, has tried to make a little go far (the film is shot in Germany and non-backwoods are limited) and it’s a mostly admirable attempt to emulate the kind of film a studio used to make, almost convincing enough to be snapped up by one.
Yet the journey itself is not quite as perilous and as suspenseful as we are necessarily expecting, the low budget shows itself in the film’s light number of setpieces and I’d argue that even without anything more bombastic, the story could have afforded some more oomph, danger was felt at times, but never as seat-clenchingly as I had hoped. The script, from Shelby Gaines, Matthew Chapman and Matthew Booi relies heavily on a stock character I’ve grown to hate in stories such as this – the hard-to-trust button-pushing asshole – who is activated whenever tension is required. It makes very little sense why Murphy would choose to recruit someone so completely awful, and given how the writers push Hawke’s character as the height of competence, any poor decision-making is harder to digest (see: boat-stealing scene). There’s also a limply developed romance and with the film edging a two hour length it doesn’t fully deserve, some careful cuts could help tighten things up.
But it’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak. He makes The Weight seem like light work.
The Weight is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
