The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter **½

The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter (Jody Hill, 2018)

Global Acquisition – Comedy

The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter’s plot is concerned with Buck Ferguson (Josh Brolin), a legend in his own mind who makes a living selling videos of himself hunting the titular whitetail deer. Having been divorced by his wife, Buck is concerned that his 12-year old son Jaden (Montana Jordan) is drifting away from him and towards his mother’s new boyfriend (Scott McNairy) as a surrogate father figure. So Buck decides to “invite” Jaden along for the shoot of his newest video, which is to be made with Buck’s long-suffering film-making partner Don (Danny McBride). Problems ensue as the boy has no interest in hunting, Dan is considering quitting as Buck’s assistant and Buck’s arrogance and drinking help to alienate him from both.

The film was mainly marketed – to the extent that Netflix markets any of its smaller films – as a generational conflict between Buck and his smartphone obsessed son, but really it attempts to be more like a redneck version of a Noah Baumbach film. Buck is a self-deluded egomaniac and his kid and friends pay the price for that. But unlike Baumbach’s best works, Legacy just doesn’t get you to laugh or care enough to achieve the kind of poignant dramedy that it seems like writer/director Jody Hill was going for.

Hill really thinks that Buck’s hunting videos are hilarious and repeats them at several points. The first one is genuinely amusing, but the joke gets old really fast. The running gags in which Jaden does something millennial every time Buck wants to do something old-school and manly likewise get tiresome fast, and really were better suited to a Tim Allen sitcom than a film like this. The only consistently funny thing in the film is Don’s weird relationship with Jaden, but even this goes awry as Don graduates from awkward jokes about masturbation to showing Jaden his homemade pornography, a scene that is supposed to be funny but which to me seemed an awful lot like the kind of grooming that pedophiles do to intended victims.

In trying to make the film moving, Hill and his writers run out of ways to make this happen through dialogue at a point, though they weren’t helped a great deal by some sub-par acting from Jordan in particular. One of the problems with the film is that the three actors/characters seem to be appearing in different movies. Jordan wandered in from a Family Channel made-for-TV movie, whereas Brolin is giving an earnest and dark performance and McBride played Don as a character out of a farcical comedy. Once dialogue and performance are exhausted, the film can only think of one way to make the male characters respect and love another and that’s by having them each save each other’s lives. So we get a series of action sequences near the end of the film that jar with the attempts at intimate, emotional acting that came earlier. This feels very much like the film-makers decided to punt when they realized they needed to sell the audience on the emotional bonds developing between characters.

The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter is a difficult film to classify in a review like this. The film is amiable and amusing enough that you never get annoyed, yet for a film that was going for funny and heartwarming, it never makes you laugh uproariously or moves you emotionally. For these reasons, I spent an awful lot of time trying to decide if this was a 2 or a 3 star film, before just copping out and splitting the difference.

Netflix Tendencies

Netflix Stars

Yet another film produced by Scott Rudin and Eli Bush. The duo produced four films that ended up on Netflix in 2018 (this one, 22 July, Annihilation and Game Over, Man!). They also produced The Meyerowitz Stories and the series Five Came Back, both of which were branded as Netflix Originals.

Small Cast: One Star Wonder

There are only five actors credited with actual roles in this film. Some of the supporting stars have a bit of star profile (Jordan for example appears in the sitcom Young Sheldon), but all the film’s marketing and promotion puts its focus on Josh Brolin. Coincidentally – or not – the film was released shortly after Sicario 2 came out in US cinemas.

Limited Locations: Forest Variation

This film uses a forest setting for the bulk of the film’s action. This is a variation on the same production practices that I have mapped elsewhere in which a single or small number of locations are used. This variation creeps up in number of Netflix Originals, including The Ritual and Calibre amongst others.