‘The Weight’ Review: Ethan Hawke is Ever-Reliable in Tension-Free, Depression Era Actioner [B-] | Sundance

Over the past twenty years, Ethan Hawke has become nearly as much a part of the Sundance culture as Robert Redford himself. From the Before trilogy to his own directorial achievements such as Blaze, Hawke is a staple in Park City and a fierce advocate for independent filmmakers. It is only fitting that his latest film, The Weight, directed by first timer Padraic McKinley, would premiere at Sundance’s final Utah festival.

Hawke stars as Samuel Murphy, a widowed father of precocious little Penny (Avy Berry). It is 1933 in Eugene, Oregon and folks like Murphy are struggling to survive the Great Depression. He is a skilled mechanic, all-around problem-solver and an honest man who accepts odd jobs when they’re offered. When a neighbor offers to pay him to fix her car, he declines payment because the car is working fine. But Penny, a burgeoning grifter in pigtails, suggests breaking the engine so he can be paid to fix it. 

With his rough voice and grizzled features, Hawke looks like a man who is used to hard work. Always recognizable and yet skilled at making each role starkly different from the last, the Oscar nominee is as believable in a 1970s-set horror movie as he is on a modern-day beach in Greece, or in rugged 1850s Appalachia. He lends weight to Murphy, grounding him as the moral and logistical center of the story. 

Murphy and his daughter struggle but are happy together until he gets into a fight with some bad men in an alley, all of whom happen to be cops. It is an era of swift justice and he is sent off to a prison labor camp while Penny is scuttled off to an orphanage. Though his sentence is under a year, it is just long enough that he faces losing his daughter to the system permanently. But the warden, Clancy (Russell Crowe), offers Murphy a solution. Due to an executive order recently signed by Roosevelt, the local gold mines are shutting down and the gold confiscated by the government. If Murphy and a small team can carry a load of bars across miles of tough Oregon forest, Clancy will sign their release papers.

Clancy appears surprisingly benevolent for a prison warden, dangling promises of early release and paid wages for their labor, fielding a baseball team and letting the men have Sundays off to play. But we’ve all seen The Shawshank Redemption and there is nothing Crowe can do to convince us of the warden’s geniality. However, faced with the prospect of losing his daughter, and with no option of escape, Murphy is willing to accept the job, enlisting three poker-playing fellow prisoners to help.

The small ensemble consists of verbose racist Rankin (Austin Amelio), socialist Singh (Avi Nash), gentle Scandinavian Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), and their guards Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess). They have six days to cross a 100 mile expanse of dense wilderness with a half ton of gold bricks. If any of the load is lost, they will be killed. Although, even if they make it, the chances they’ll be killed anyway are still high. Before long, a Native woman named Anna (Julia Jones) insists on joining them, presumably running away from something in her life although it’s really just a flimsy excuse to add a capable and helpful woman to the mix.

As a first-time filmmaker, McKinley draws a lot of references from adventure stories of the past. Deliverance, Sorcerer, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre are clear inspirations, with tales of treachery, peril, and survival. The Weight is an ambitious undertaking, but one the director isn’t quite able to pull off. There is very little tension, even in scenes that call for it. Fording a river, crossing paths with gun-toting miners, rainstorms and rocky terrain are all elements that promise breath-taking intensity that never comes. When the group encounters a dilapidated rope bridge (think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) above a gaping ravine, they immediately jump to the decision that it can only be crossed one person at a time and that the only way to get all of the bricks across is for someone to stand in the middle, one side tossing a bar to him that he will catch and toss to the other side. It’s a ridiculous plan and the fact that no one even questions it, coupled with the fact that it’s the middle of the movie and Murphy is the one on the bridge, lessens any hope of the audience getting caught up in the moment.

Strong performances, particularly from Hawke, Jones, and Amelio, elevate a predictable script written by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines. Every aspect of the plot comes from some other story we’ve seen or heard before. We can guess before the journey even begins who won’t make it, who will try to double-cross the others, and who will save the day. The intrusive score, also composed by Gaines along with his brother Latham Gaines, attempts to manufacture drama where nature and dialogue cannot. It’s sometimes very good, but often a frustrating interloper. The film is beautiful to look at though, thanks to Matteo Cocco’s cinematography that captures the majesty of the Oregon wilderness.

For all the things The Weight could have been — the plight of the working class in an economic catastrophe, a commentary on government trying to solve problems by creating more, the bonds formed by a shared experience — it is a weightless film held together by quality acting and a beautiful landscape.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where The Weight had its world premiere.