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When rose tinted, crucifix sunglasses play one of the starring roles of the movie, you’re in for a ride!

With apologies to James Brown, Nicolas Cage may currently be the hardest working man in show business. After three releases last year, including the critically praised Osgood Perkins outing "Longlegs," Cage is back in his first film of 2025. Billed as a Western thriller, "Gunslingers" follows the story of outlaw Thomas Keller (Stephen Dorff) as he tries to outrun an unfortunate, bloody incident in 1900's New York City. His journey takes him to Redemption, Kentucky, an off the beaten track western town populated solely by other outlaws looking to leave their pasts behind. Keller's catches up to him though, first in the form of his brother's wife (Heather Graham) and daughter, and eventually in the form of his vengeful brother. Here Keller and the rest of the reformed gunslingers, Nic Cage's Ben included, will be forced to make a stand.

Writer-director Brian Skiba really has something here. Who wouldn't want to see a story about a functioning town on the edge of the frontier whose occupants all washed up on its streets after leaving behind lives of murder and theft? The idea is bigger than one movie though; it deserves to be its own cinematic universe, with off-shoots and trilogies contained within! Heck, I would watch an entire movie where these former criminals collaborate and try to put together a proposal to get zoning permission for a new brothel from the city council. The closing-credits scene in the movie even shows the potential of a buddy vigilante story line between two of the minor characters and it's great! What we get with "Gunslingers," however, is a standalone movie where a thousand ideas are presented but none are fully explored.

Back to those sunglasses, though! While they deserved their own trailer on set, they're nothing compared to what is going on behind them, as Nic Cage chews more scenery in 104 minutes than most actors could chomp down in their entire careers. His character Ben is a reformed gunslinger who has found Christianity and promised God that he won't touch guns ever again. He also appears to have promised God to be in a different movie, as he is consistently acting and dressing larger than life in a story where everyone else is trying to disappear.

I love Nic Cage. He is a tremendous actor who loves to combine his talent with choices so left of field that Bernie's mittens would say, "Easy guy!" In "Gunslingers," Mr. Cage does not disappoint. In a town bereft of idiosyncrasies, Cage's Ben makes up the slack and then some. He speaks in such a low rasp the entire time that you almost have to lean in to hear him. No reason is given for this - was he strangled at some point? For his wardrobe, they clearly let Nic into the warehouse and said "pick anything." What he came up with is larger than life and would appear to be lifted straight from the pages of a graphic novel, but isn't. I want to - need to - know more about him. What was he before? How did he find Jesus? Where did he get those glasses? Why does everyone seem to like him even though his only form of conversation is holding the bible in their faces?

In short, while this movie feels incomplete, I want more, not less! Give Brian Skiba three more movies to build this world out. Let him dig in. They don't all need the same tone, just the same spine. None of the actors in "Gunslinger" missed; let them all weave in and out of each other's storylines. Marvel Cinematic Universe, "Fast and the Furious," "Bad Boys," they're all fine, but let us have a lower budget universe where the stories and characters keep us coming back!