Casting aside, the film is a rip-roaring, blood-splattering blast of shoot-outs and bank robberies, with a soundtrack that bursts with hip-hop, funk and reggae, and an attitude taken straight from Quentin Tarantino. 'It is easy to forget that this is Samuel's feature film directorial debut,' writes William Stottor at Loud and Clear. 'Boasting some of the best acting, direction, cinematography and action sequences of the year, The Harder They Fall is so fantastically intoxicating, a heady mixture of nostalgia and freshness moulded together to form something quite breathless.'
The heroes include Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz, and Delroy Lindo the villains include Idris Elba, Regina King, and LaKeith Stanfield. Director Jeymes Samuel goes some small way towards redressing the balance with The Harder They Fall, a stylish Western in which almost all of the characters, heroes and villains, are played by black actors. A quarter of all the cowboys in the Old West were black, but the proportion is a lot smaller in Hollywood Westerns.
