Almost a masterpiece

I checked this out after Quentin’s campaign to resurrect it, I really enjoyed it, especially for Devane’s performance - quiet and understated, making you lean in and sense the ‘rolling thunder’ that erupts at the end. Young Tommy was also awesome ‘I’ll get my stuff” 🤟🏻 and Linda Haynes’ bouncy charm was a great foil for Devane’s human terminator.

(Spoilers ahead)

But I wanted a bit more from the ending. Having the heroes limp off alive felt incomplete given the emerging themes of the film. I’d like to have seen Devane die as by that point he was a ghost, unable to live a normal life, had one hand, and he had completed his ‘karmic mission’.

I like to think Tommy is wounded but lives - he bravely helped his friend, but he has the chance for a normal life. To kill him off (the original script apparently had them both die) seems too sadistic for a film that had already massacred Devane’s family.

Which leads me to the other major death - the killing of Cliff. This felt wasted. I’d love to have seen him die fighting alongside the man whose wife and kid he stole - that would have been dramatically amazing. Instead he’s just more meat thrown into the grinder of the villains, and we never even saw Devane or anyone react to his murder.

It sounds like Paul Schrader’s original script was more confident, especially with its ending, and Heywood Gould’s rewrite lightened things up but left a muddled wrap-up. Sometimes an ambiguous ending is the right way to go, here it felt like a cop-out.