"Jane Got a Gun" has no apparent or cohesive theme, but attempts to compensate with rousing orchestral music which seems intended to convey to the audience how they ought to feel at this point in the movie if the plot and dialogue were up to the task of engendering such emotional responses.
The acting is actually good, although the dialogue is a bit hackneyed and saturated with exposition. The cinematography would be pretty good if they had spent a small portion of their $25MM budget on some form of rigid support system (like a tripod). The jiggly-cam shots are not the worst by a long shot, but are distracting. The pyrotechnics in one scene are very well done. Lighting and mise en scène are good. Makeup effects are good.
Some elements don't make much sense. At one point they need jars and empty out a dozen Mason jars of green beans and such. The film takes place in 1871. People didn't discard their Mason jars. They cleaned and sterilized them and reused them. There should have been a lot of empty jars around waiting to be filled with whatever crop would be harvested. A building is shot up to the extent the walls resemble a colander, but there aren't splinters all over the floor and nothing much inside seems to have been hit. Wanted criminals with hefty rewards on their heads live openly and run businesses.
But the big problem is in the lack of a theme or moral. Ordinarily, one might expect an ordinary person to be confronted with an ordeal that tests their mettle and forces them to grow somehow in order to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Here, the characters don't grow or acquire new skills. They endure hardships that tear their world apart, but survive. Consequently, everything falls into place and they have a much brighter future because they survived, not because they prevailed by becoming stronger. The good guys confront insurmountable odds, but through a clever device manage to even the odds early on. Rather than confronting escalating challenges, they confront diminishing challenges. Jane prevails by becoming as brutal as her adversary, but immediately returns to her peaceful existence as if she had never sunk to such depths.
The acting is actually good, although the dialogue is a bit hackneyed and saturated with exposition. The cinematography would be pretty good if they had spent a small portion of their $25MM budget on some form of rigid support system (like a tripod). The jiggly-cam shots are not the worst by a long shot, but are distracting. The pyrotechnics in one scene are very well done. Lighting and mise en scène are good. Makeup effects are good.
Some elements don't make much sense. At one point they need jars and empty out a dozen Mason jars of green beans and such. The film takes place in 1871. People didn't discard their Mason jars. They cleaned and sterilized them and reused them. There should have been a lot of empty jars around waiting to be filled with whatever crop would be harvested. A building is shot up to the extent the walls resemble a colander, but there aren't splinters all over the floor and nothing much inside seems to have been hit. Wanted criminals with hefty rewards on their heads live openly and run businesses.
But the big problem is in the lack of a theme or moral. Ordinarily, one might expect an ordinary person to be confronted with an ordeal that tests their mettle and forces them to grow somehow in order to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Here, the characters don't grow or acquire new skills. They endure hardships that tear their world apart, but survive. Consequently, everything falls into place and they have a much brighter future because they survived, not because they prevailed by becoming stronger. The good guys confront insurmountable odds, but through a clever device manage to even the odds early on. Rather than confronting escalating challenges, they confront diminishing challenges. Jane prevails by becoming as brutal as her adversary, but immediately returns to her peaceful existence as if she had never sunk to such depths.