We’re in Appalachia for Red Right Hand, latest film by the Nelms brothers, Eshom and Ian. And immediately having said Appalachia, the shades start to assemble. Poor lives on the margin. Cackling inbreeds. Illicit drugs. Attack dogs. Tattoos. Guns and hunting. God. The family. Male relationships that seem overly familiar.
Check, check, check, check and check (plus a few more). No one seems overly intent on overturning the stereotypes in Orlando Bloom’s latest foray into action-hero territory. This he has been exploring, presumably since he and his agent sat around scratching their heads over what to do with his career – Lord of the Rings must have been lucrative but that was a while ago and led nowhere good. Nor, really, did the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which increasingly sidelined Bloom in favour of Johnny Depp. And also led nowhere – roles as handsome ship’s captains (or cabin boys – what was he exactly?) aren’t exactly over-burdening our screens at the moment.
And so tough guys of one sort or another it has increasingly become, with Red Right Hand the latest in an occasional line of actioners Bloom has been headlining when he’s not taking down-table work in more mainstream movies.
We get the measure of the man in the opening scene, in which Bloom’s Cash (a grrr name) is shown working out shirtless, doing pull-ups and press-ups… while smoking a cigarette. Tough guy, right? It turns out Cash is a refugee from a crime outfit run by local badass Big Cat (Andie MacDowell), and is now more a god and family kind of guy, hoping to just keep things on the straight and narrow in perpetuity. But he’s forced back into Big Cat’s orbit by his drunken brother’s inability to pay her back the money he owes, money he borrowed to secure the family farm.
Three tasks, Big Cat tells Cash when they eventually meet, do me three little jobs and I’ll release you and your family from the obligation. And so, reluctantly, Cash goes back to work. Drugs, gangs, guns sort of work.
It’s a good story set in the sort of Appalachia that we’ve come to expect from movies like A Winter’s Bone or JD Vance’s autobiography. Tough but tight. Off the grid. God-fearing but lawless, and Bloom invests his character with all of that, plus traditional strong, silent wafts of Clint Eastwood in Man with No Name guise.
Bloom sends all this stuff up brilliantly in Deep Cover, a comedy about inept people trying and failing at action-hero heroics – hilarious, if you haven’t seen it – so he clearly knows what he’s doing with the character of Cash, who is familiar and enjoyable enough. But if you think Bloom is overdoing the hard-bitten hard-man stuff, you haven’t seen Andie MacDowell as Big Cat, the presiding crime matriarch and full-bore psychopath who has everyone from law-enforcement down in her pocket. She’s the best thing in this movie by a long stretch, with the casting against type almost at the level of Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West. More films featuring MacDowell as a loquacious gang boss with a fetish for torture, a quease-inducing relationship with blood and a love of a semi-automatic weapon would not be a bad thing.
There are some grim visuals – bone-splinteringly grim – but it would all be great, a big bag of action fun, if the pacing weren’t so goddam slow. Twenty minutes shorter would make this movie 20 minutes better. All that stuff around Garret Dillahunt’s Pastor Wilder (name and nature) is sand in the action-movie gearbox, though there’s nothing wrong with Dillahunt himself, nor Chapel Oaks as Cash’s neice, who increasingly comes into her own as the movie progresses. I also really liked Kenneth Miller and Nicholas Logan as a pair of wild-eyed henchmen called Buck and The Doe (suggestive names). Good and salty, nasty as they come, genuinely frightening.
Loved it? Not quite? All the ingredients are there… it just needs a shake.
Red Right Hand – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
