Alec Baldwin stars as a grizzled outlaw determined to rescue his grandson from the gallows in this gritty Western. We get glimpses of redemption, but they come only after viewers are bombarded by brutality and profanity in a movie that wasn’t rated yet certainly would have earned an R-rating from the MPA.
A boy stares blankly at a gravestone. “Wilhemenia Hollister,” it reads. “Taken by Diphtheria. Gone to this world. 12 August 1878.”
Next to the headstone, a makeshift wooden cross marks another passing: “Langford Hollister,” it says simply.
This orphaned boy doesn’t stare long at these humble memorials to his parents. He doesn’t have the luxury of grief. For years now, the 13-year-old has shouldered the responsibility of a man, tending to the farm, feeding a few pigs, gathering a few eggs. Most importantly, he’s tended to his little brother, Jacob.
Now, there’s a bite in the air as winter approaches. If a wolf could laugh, the one that patrols the perimeter of the Hollister farm in Wyoming Territory in 1882 would surely have done so. He smells the boy’s vulnerability, and his easy, loping gait mocks the boy’s attempts to intimidate him.
Soon, Lucas dutifully hauls what little he has farmed into nearby Hayesville, perhaps bartering just enough to keep himself and his brother alive for another winter.
Perhaps.
But when a thuggish youth at the mercantile exchange harasses little Jacob and accuses their mother of being a syphilis-ridden “whore,” Lucas snaps, beating the youth with a piece of wood, breaking his arm.
The lout’s father arrives the next day to tell Lucas there’s now a debt to be paid for his son’s treatment. He’ll be back tomorrow to compel Lucas to become, essentially, his indentured servant.
The fateful day arrives, cold and hard, inevitable as the hungry winter wind. And so does the laughing, mocking wolf. Lucas grabs his father’s cherished rifle—the one that the man used to take his own life shortly after Wilhemenia’s death—and gives chase to the wolf. But the moment Lucas pulls the trigger, the man who’s come to make him a slave drifts into the bullet’s path.
Lucas didn’t mean to kill him. Honest. But Wyoming in 1882 is hard as flint. And so he’s sentenced to hang as soon as the gallows can be constructed.
He would have, too, but for a man spiriting him away the night before his execution. A man named Harland Rust, Lucas’ estranged grandfather.
Rust isn’t given to sentimentality. But neither will he stand by and let a boy, his grandson, hang. And so begins a perilous flight to Mexico, on horseback, with what seems like all the lawmen and all the bounty hunters in the savage West giving chase.
It’s a long way to the border.
Harland Rust is determined to protect his grandson from a cruel twist of fate that has pronounced the boy a murderer. Rust sacrifices greatly to do so, placing himself in harm’s way repeatedly in his attempt to secure a new life for Lucas in Mexico, beyond the reach of U.S. authorities in 1882. But lest we paint the old man too heroically, Rust himself is also a textbook antihero, as merciless and calloused himself as the men pursuing them.
Rust often treats Lucas harshly. And as far as the boy is concerned, Rust’s actions are less of a rescue than they are a kidnapping. Slowly, though, each develops a kind of affection for the other. At one point, Rust even goes so far as to buy a puppy for the boy, never mind that they’re fleeing a small army of pursuers on horseback. Rust watches wistfully as the boy plays with the little dog, a smile almost touching his craggy face.
Perhaps two or three times elsewhere in the story, we see characters act with a modicum of decency and grace toward Lucas Hollister. But it’s a short list, to be sure.
One of Rust’s primary pursuers is a lawman named Wood Helm, himself a case-hardened instrument of justice in the lawless West. But his humanity is tragically apparent, too, as he’s unable to face the reality that his own young son is dying of consumption. His wife, Emma, desperately wants her husband to exhibit some emotion, to be engaged in his son’s plight, but to no avail. Helm is as close to a good man as we’ll see in Rust, but even he is a deeply marred and damaged character.
Someone quotes a saying attributed in the film to Plato: “The wise man speaks because he has something to say. The fool speaks because he must say something.”
Helm talks despairingly about the notion that God exists. He recounts a story of a man, who apparently found God before his hanging, talking joyfully of going on to his “great reward.” Helm spits, “There’s no great reward. … Just an eternity of nothin’.” Elsewhere he asks another man, “Can you explain to me where God is up in that bedroom with my boy?” When there’s no answer, Helm proffers one himself: “The s— I seen, the s— I done. I knew a long time ago there ain’t no God.”
Multiple men are hung for various crimes throughout the film. In each case, a minister says a prayer for the condemned that invokes God’s justice, mercy and grace. But it’s pretty obvious that there’s more justice than grace being delivered in every one of those brutal executions.
A bounty hunter nicknamed “Preacher” often quotes Scripture and has a superficial infatuation with things of faith. He brags about being a man of the Word and wears a cross. But it’s all for show, as he’s a heartless, cold-blooded killer whose real faith involves a smoking gun barrel and a fat bounty.
Indeed, even though there’s quite a lot of superficial God talk in this story, it’s rare that references to Christian faith are anything other than a culturally expected veneer. That said, one person does briefly try to advocate for Lucas when he’s in jail, a distant relative named Evelyn Basset. She quotes Psalm 82:3 in an attempt to convict Lucas’ jailers into seeing the injustice they’re perpetrating: “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless.”
Someone philosophizes, “The only order in this universe is the order we impose. A man loses sight of that, he’s got nothing.” Rust tells someone, as he breaks Lucas out of jail, “Now you tell any son of a b–ch that comes after me that he will shake hands with the devil himself.” Similarly, someone says, “You sold your soul to the devil.”
Preacher has sex with a prostitute in a brothel (we see her in undergarments on a bed after the fact). He also seduces a lonely widow in a remote cabin, and a brief but forceful sexual encounter is partially shown, though both remain fully clothed.
As mentioned, a bully suggests that Lucas and Jacob’s mother died of syphilis because she was a prostitute (which she wasn’t).
Early on, Lucas doesn’t trust Rust, doesn’t believe the man could be his grandfather and isn’t interested in Rust’s plan to save him.
“You’re a murderer,” Lucas accuses (after having seen Rust kill multiple men).
“Well, that’s something we have in common,” Rust retorts.
“You can go to h—!” Lucas yells, prompting Rust to sock the boy in the mouth. “The first one’s gentle. The next one won’t be.”
You know when the film’s “hero” is a sixtysomething man hitting a young teen in the mouth to teach him a lesson that it’s going to be a doozy of a film, violence-wise.
And so it is. Rust dispatches many a pursuer without a second thought. Likewise, the men chasing him all seem hardened killers, even those who supposedly represent some semblance of the law.
Most of those who perish do so by gunshot wound, though a few are stabbed as well. Blood and spittle mingle and fly, though most of this violence is not particularly graphic. That brutality is, however, practically nonstop. At one point, Lucas asks Rust how many men he’s killed. Rust stares off into the distance and intones, “I don’t know,” and it seems an honest answer.
We also hear Rust’s origin story of sorts—how he lost his wife in an epic flood and then lost his farm to the bank. He responded to the latter with dynamite, propelling him instantly into outlaw status that begat more crime and more murderous mayhem.
Lucas says his dad killed himself with a rifle a year after his wife died.
Rust and Lucas use a snare to capture a rabbit to eat on the trail, and we hear the older man dispatch it with his bare hands. Lucas also peppers Rust with questions about whether he’s seen someone hang and what that is like, a fascination seemingly born of the fact that Lucas narrowly avoided that fate himself. Rust won’t tell him at first, and he says it’s not worth thinking about. Later, though, Rust goes into detail about what happens when a man is hung, saying it can take as long as an hour for some men to perish. Eventually, Rust and Lucas are travelling through a small town when a hanging occurs, and Lucas rushes to watch it. (And the audience sees it, too.)
Lucas unleashes a beatdown with a piece of wood upon a bully who mocks his mother. Preacher’s “seduction” of a widowed homesteader drifts toward sexual assault territory when he grows angry with her.
We hear stories about how Preacher’s ancestors hunted (and at times killed) runaway slaves. Multiple anecdotes describe Native peoples scalping settlers.
About 10 uses each of the f- and s-words. We hear nearly 20 uses of God’s name paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is misused about half a dozen times. An extremely harsh slang term for the male anatomy is spoken three times. Other vulgarities used three to six times each include “a–,” “h—,” “b–ch” and “d–n.” “B–tard” is used once. A prostitute is described as a “snaggletooth swine donkey.” We hear several references to “whores.”
Several scenes take place in saloons where men are drinking.
Rust dispenses all manner of euphemisms born of his own hard life. When Lucas complains that he doesn’t want to go to Mexico, for instance, Rust says, “Want don’t figure into it. There’s alive, and there ain’t. Try to focus on the former.” Lucas has clearly inherited some moral fiber, too, telling Rust, “My pa used to say a man who looks over his shoulder on a straight piece of road ain’t a man who’s lived an honest life.”
If ever a film could be described as tragically ironic, Rust might be it. The story opens with a boy accidentally killing a man and then being jailed for it. And in October 2021, something broadly similar happened during the filming of this movie.
Star Alec Baldwin allegedly and accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, as well as wounding director Joel Souza. The high-profile accident—and the subsequent investigation into whether and/or how Baldwin’s gun was loaded with live ammunition—led to involuntary manslaughter charges against Baldwin, though they were eventually dropped. Meanwhile, the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison. She was released about three weeks after the film’s debut in May 2025.
Matthew Hutchins, Halyna’s husband, took over as executive producer on the film after the tragedy, helping to push it through to release as a tribute to his late wife. Rust concludes with a quote from her onscreen: “What can we do to make this better?”
As gritty Westerns go, Rust delivers an engaging story. We’re immersed in a ferocious frontier reality where power—often signified by a loaded gun and the willingness to use it—is the only thing that really matters. Lip service is given to the importance of justice, of course, and to the fact that God ostensibly is the One who administers it.
But in reality, what we see is a cold, hard existence where the distance between life and death, between morality and lawlessness, is rarely very far, and where many of those who end up dead didn’t deserve it. At one point, Rust says, “Lucas, you ain’t a boy no more. My guess is you haven’t been a boy for a while. You were dealt a bum hand. That’s just the way it is.”
Harland Rust has made peace with this harsh reality. Which is to say, he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way if necessary, something he’s done countless times before.
And yet, something in him longs for a different outcome for young Lucas. That yearning drives Rust to rescue the boy and spirit him south in the hope of a new life. In that, we get a glimpse at redemption for both characters: Rust as the architect of it and Lucas as the recipient.
But let’s get real here: It’s just a glimpse. And that glimpse comes only after we endure two-plus hours of nonstop brutality and profanity, as well as characters despairing of the hope of God in a pain-filled world. Rust wasn’t rated, but this Western treads across R-rated territory nonetheless.
The story behind Rust’s filming is a horrifically tragic one. And the bulk of what we see onscreen reflects a tragically broken world, too, even if there’s a glimmer of hope by the time the credits roll. But even if you’re a hardcore Western lover, that may not be enough reason to saddle up for this harsh cinematic journey.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
