THE STORY – Muriel and her husband, Lee, are about to begin a bright new life, which is upended by the arrival of Lee’s brother. Muriel embarks on a secret life, gambling on racehorses and discovering a love she never thought possible.
THE CAST – Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva & Sasha Calle
THE TEAM – Daniel Minahan (Director) & Bryce Krass (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 117 Minutes
Life is only beginning for happy couple Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter). As the pair celebrate Christmas in their Kansas home, Lee’s brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) arrives only to complicate things, with the trio’s eventual plan to make a new life for themselves out west in California and Julius’ blossoming relationship with Muriel. What follows is an interwoven journey of these three lost souls struggling to explore life in an era preventing them from being their true selves. On paper, “On Swift Horses” should have worked, but the final result is a bore of a film where the audience’s intrigue is fleeting. The newest endeavor from filmmaker Daniel Minahan is practically a miss in almost every aspect. Any nuance that might’ve come from Shannon Pufahl’s source material is mostly stripped away by Bryce Kass’s latent screenplay.
With what is translated into the film, every character is either uninteresting or underwritten, leaving much to be desired from those who watch. Certain relationships between characters are half-heartedly explored, as there’s little below the surface. The only engaging dynamic in the film is between Julius and Muriel, who are bound together by their repressed desires, and even that is muddled as the film goes on. For the entirety of “On Swift Horses,” Muriel and Julius’s relationship is spelled out for audiences, only for borderline psycho-sexual elements to come into play, creating a haziness too far into the film to have made any reasonable sense. Certain “desires” and metaphorical expressions are spelled out through Minahan’s direction in a surface-level manner.
Minahan’s actual direction is slightly better, but “On Swift Horses” never maintains consistency in terms of quality. At times, the production design does a fantastic job of recreating various locales of the early 1950s United States and Mexico. The costuming is more effective at depicting the characters’ identities than the screenplay itself. Plenty is conveyed through Muriel’s costuming, especially with how it evolves throughout the film. Yet, aspects like the cinematography tend to vary, going from quality work to looking like a pilot filmed for a television series. The editing also isn’t up to par, as not only does the film feel longer than it is, but certain characters are absent for large sections, only to be unevenly inserted back into the fold, never providing any momentum to what (at times) can be a fast-paced story.
“On Swift Horses” is a movie that only excels in fragments. One’s intrigue might be piqued whenever the story is focused on Julius’s fever dream descent into Vegas, his relationship with Henry (Diego Calva), and navigating the seedy world of card game con artistry. The same could be said about Edgar-Jones when she’s mirroring Julius’s journey, pulling off a racket of her own back on the West Coast while betting on racehorses. It helps that both actors deliver some of the few memorable moments in “On Swift Horses.” Elordi benefits from having showier material, as Edgar-Jones (who gives a solid performance) can only do so much with the material given to her. Honestly, it’s a waste of an ensemble filled with so many talented young performers. Poulter, Calva, and Sasha Calle are underutilized or inhabit uninteresting characters, so it’s a shame their talents aren’t being maximized. In addition, besides Elordi and Edgar-Jones, the entire ensemble has very little chemistry with one another. That’s not a good thing, especially since the film’s plot is contingent on audiences being enamored by certain relationships. Sure, Elordi and Calva’s characters are both attractive, but at the very least, the erotic nature of their relationship is more than palpable throughout the movie. If only the relationship itself was as absorbing as how they’re both captured on film. When you reach the final scene of “On Swift Horses,” it all fades away because you’ve most likely already checked out long ago.
“On Swift Horses” could have been a decent film, yet it falls apart, becoming a reminder of why not every novel needs to be adapted into a film. There’s too much material, and with Minahan’s many years in television, this project might have been better suited for the limited series format. There are too many dynamics and a slew of characters that don’t all properly get the resolution that would’ve been far more established within the confines of episodic television. Instead, the source material has been stripped, and yet is overflowing with characters and ideas that won’t have any lasting effect on those who watch it.
