Red Right Hand

dirs.: Eshome & Ian Nelms

2024

You call something Red Right Hand, and it comes with certain expectations.

And before you come at me and say “well, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds don’t have a monopoly on the words “red right hand”, plus Cave lifted the phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost” I would say to that “yeah but…”

How can you have a movie called Red Right Hand, and not have the song play at any point of the proceedings? I spent the entire length of the movie wondering “is it going to play now? What about now?”

And it’s not there. Not even a cover of it. Not even an instrumental version of it, or an Appalachian version of it. Not even a bad cover of it. Nothing.

Talk about a bait and switch: you baited me with the title, and then gave me nothing.

Well played, you curs; well played, you bounders.

I don’t remember if they ever expressly say where any of this story is meant to be taking place, but rest assured it’s somewhere meth-ridden and gap-toothed, so it’s somewhere in the South. That famous Southerner Orlando Bloom plays a guy called Cash who just wants to look after his family and live a somewhat honest life down on the farm.

He is shown waking up, smoking, and then working out while still smoking. So, is he meant to be a bit of a knob, or is that to make him seem cool?

Cash lives on a property with his niece Savannah (Chapel Oaks) and his brother-in-law Finney (Scott Haze). They run the farm together. Finney is an alcoholic, so, he’s not much use after the drink kicks in. The obvious person missing, Cash’s sister, Finney’s wife, is all the excuse Finney needs to drink himself stupid with relative frequency.

Cash is not a drinker, though he used to be. His sister’s overdose tipped him over the edge, but with his love for his niece, and the support of the church, he’s been able to claw his way back to sobriety. Finney ain’t there yet.

Well everything seems to be chugging along nicely, so naturally something has to come along and fuck everything up, which arises from Finney getting a loan from the local crime lord, known as Big Cat (Andie McDowell).

You may having been asking all the while as to whether the song was going to play (no, sadly), or why it’s called Red Right Hand – Cash used to work for Big Cat, and wanted out. The price for exiting her good graces is you have to immerse your right arm into her fireplace until it’s good and crispy.

Cash has a red right hand, literally, from burn scars as opposed to blood. So he’s out of the criminal life, but Big Cat wants to force him back in.

Andie McDowell is amazing in this, I think. She’s still her charming Southern belle self, but now she deploys her talents for evil. Ye gods does she play this sadistic monster with relish. Cutting people’s thumbs off, threatening children, she does it all. And Cash, being the loyal family-loving type that he is, he’ll do absolutely everything Big Cat wants even though he knows, like we do, that she won’t stop killing people until Cash kills her and her brood of lunatics.

The journey there is perhaps an eventful one, with the hope of maybe finding an alternative way out of his predicament, but it’s pretty obvious and not exactly brimming with surprises. It is competent, though, in what it does, and ticks all the boxes of what you might want or expect from a film overflowing with hillbillies. There’s no duelling banjos, but there’s plenty of righteous vengeance delivered from the barrels of guns guns guns.

The Appalachian stuff, well, I think it’s more there for window-dressing than anything else. It doesn’t really say much about the place other than that there’s meth and oxy / hillbilly heroin everywhere. We don’t really get a sense of the town, other than that Big Cat rules it with an iron fist, with a complacent police force in her pocket.

And there’s a church as well. Coincidentally, the shaven-headed preacher (Garett Dillahunt, not playing a villain for once) who tends to his flock there, also has a red right hand. I wonder if that’s going to play a role in what’s to come?

Savannah is wonderfully played and all, and handy with a knife, so handy, but she’s mostly around in order to have someone to threaten, to have someone to justify so many killings. Oh so many killings.

I know, it’s silly for someone voluntarily to sit down to watch an action crime flick wishing that the protagonists could find some other way to resolve a plot other than by shooting everyone in the face, but I’ve seen too many films. Too many flicks just like this where almost everyone has to die in order for “peace” to have a chance.

Orlando Bloom is fine, I guess. I dunno about the accent, though. And, as a curious aside, as the character Cash, Bloom often wears a baseball cap backwards, and whenever he does that he ended up looking a lot like Silent Bob / Kevin Smith. I don’t rightly know if that’s the look they were going for, but now I’m wondering if Kevin Smith could have starred in this.

If he had there probably would have been more dick jokes. Bloom plays the role as a canny hick, who’s a little bit smarter than the other hicks he’s surrounded with, but there’s no real explanation as to why he’s such a competent gunman, other than that he’s been hunting all his life. There doesn’t seem to be much of an interior life to the character, beyond exactly what he says and exactly what he does. I don’t know if Orlando Bloom is the guy you hire for deep and meaningful roles, so maybe he’s perfect for this.

This flick is neither Winter’s Bone nor Hell or High Water, but I think it aspired to be something more than just “hillbillies killing hillbillies in the hills”. I’m not sure it really achieved anything substantial beyond killing two hours.

In the song, the person or entity with the red right hand is probably the devil – he appears out of nowhere, but he ain’t what he seems. You see him in your nightmares, you see him in your dreams, and yet we’re all just microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan, designed and directed by his red right hand. In Milton’s epic poem, it’s God who has a red right hand because of the divine vengeance He carries out on those who piss Him off.

Here, whatever pretensions the directors might have about what this flick aspires to be, Southern Crime Gothic Hillbilly Elegy, maybe, it’s only called Red Right Hand because it sounds cool. Sounds Biblical. But if even Nick Cave didn’t allow them to purchase the rights to use the song in their movie, when he’s been happy to have it used in tequila commercials and in stacks of other movies, including Dumb and Dumber way, way back in the day, what does that tell you?

Did they fly him to LA, play the film for him, and after he stood up from his seat, buttoned his immaculately tailored black suit, arched an eyebrow, and said “I’d rather not” as he walked out of the cinema?

I can see that happening. I can see it so vividly, like it actually happened, like he planned it that way just to crush the hopes of two young directors just starting out (they're not, at all, they're oldies).

7 times competence is still better than its enthusiastic alternative out of 10

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“For God, for Family, for Survival” – make Appalachia great again - Red Right Hand