I’m always drawn to movies filmed in the Pacific Northwest because the landscapes are just stunning. The Weight takes place in Oregon back in 1933, right in the middle of the Great Depression, when the U.S. government was about to take control of the gold supply. 

The movie centers on Ethan Hawke‘s grounded, gritty performance as Samuel Murphy, a worn-out former soldier working as a mechanic and struggling to get by. When we first see Samuel, he and his young daughter Penny (Avy Berry) are hunting for a new place to live after getting evicted. Things go downhill fast when he accidentally gets tangled up with some undercover cops who play rough, and he ends up doing a year in a harsh labor camp.

While working at the camp, Samuel’s knack for problem solving and fixing things catch the eye of a conniving and corrupt warden, Clancy (Russell Crowe). Grateful that Samuel fixes his car, Clancy offers him a deal: get a pardon so he can see his daughter before she’s taken from her temporary home and given to the state for adoption. The price? Samuel must lead a group of prisoners to carry a large amount of gold across 100 miles of brutal, unforgiving Oregon wilderness before the government takes control of it. 

This is Padraic McKinley’s feature debut; he previously directed the TV shows Kingdom and Fightworld. The story was conceived by Matthew Booi and Leo Scherman, who also wrote the screenplay with Shelby Gaines. The basic premise seems simple: Samuel and his team just need to move the gold to a secret pickup point, and everyone goes free. But as expected, things turn out to be much more complicated than that.

“People get funny around gold. They’ll lie, cheat, they’ll kill you for it. You get mighty close to the bone.”

That’s exactly what Clancy’s equally corrupt partner Taggert (Alec Newman) tells Samuel before the trip starts, and his warning turns out to be completely accurate. Samuel must stay alert and protect himself while moving with his group: The unpredictable talker Rankin (Austin Amelio), a prisoner from another country, Singh (Avi Nash) and a young Scandinavian prisoner Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen). During their journey, they meet a mysterious woman called Anna (Julia Jones, whom I recognized from Westworld and The Mandalorian TV series) and she ends up joining the all-male group. With greed and doubt all around them, Samuel’s biggest threat comes from the ire and tension building up within his own team.

This is really Hawke’s movie—he’s doing the heavy lifting, both figuratively and literally. The guy’s incredibly versatile and can nail pretty much any role, and this might be one of the most physically demanding performances I’ve seen from him. McKinley is quite adept at directing the action scenes, and Bavaria, Germany, served as a stand-in for the Pacific Northwest.

Collaborating with Italian cinematographer Matteo Cocco, they lean into nature to build this atmospheric, edge-of-your-seat intensity during a thunderstorm. The downpour and thick mud make it tough to see what’s happening—you can only catch glimpses of people when lightning flashes. It’s a clever move that makes the action feel chaotic and genuinely scary. 

There are some seriously intense action sequences that’ll make your heart race. You’ve got this rickety rope bridge spanning a massive canyon where the crew’s hauling half-ton loads of gold. The most harrowing one has to be the log-jam scene when a wall of timber barrels down the rapids straight at the crew trying to cross a treacherous river. It’s breathtaking to see Samuel get pinned under the weight of those massive, shifting logs.

It’s wise that the screenwriters focus on the story of the perilous journey of transporting the gold. There’s no random subplots or extra frills cluttering up the main narrative. My only quibble is that it feels a tad long at nearly two hours; the midsection could be trimmed down a bit. I wish Crowe had more screen time, but the Aussie thespian is always a blast to watch and brings real weight (pun fully intended) to whatever he does.

The Weight has this cool old-school 70s period thriller vibes, such as Deliverance (1972) and Sorcerer (1977), that somehow comes across quite fresh. Props to McKinley for his solid direction on his first film. Hawke continues to show his remarkable range, proving that he’s truly one of the finest and most versatile performers working today.

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