Some action movies arrive with a bang. Others sort of slouch through the saloon doors, wipe the dust from their boots, and promptly trip over their own spurs. Day of Reckoning opens with all the promise you get from a cast headlined by Scott Adkins in a ten-gallon hat, Billy Zane dusting off his best villainous glare, and a plot that all but shouts “shootout at sundown!” Five minutes in, you realize the film isn’t actually interested in its cast, its plot, or setting fire to the screen. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of some deep-fried bar snack, salty, overdone, and destined to give you regret.
Shaun Silva, whose roots are mostly in country music videos, directs, and you can sense how that background keeps yanking at the film’s sleeves. We get junky, rapid-cut showdowns, washed in muddy yellow lighting, quick-draws always promising action but mostly hinting at gravy-thick budget constraints. The setup is as old as the hills: a sheriff (Zach Roerig, doing his best “I’m over my head” squint), a crooked U.S. Marshal (Billy Zane, looking less like a lawman than someone who got lost on the way to a costume party), and an outlaw played by Cara Jade Myers, whose intensity stubbornly refuses to let the rest of the film sag entirely into parody.
And Scott Adkins, is he the cavalry? Not so fast. He’s here as “Kyle Rusk,” but for all the marketing’s bluster, he’s on screen less often than the second unit drone shots. If you’re coming for the roundhouse kicks, prepare to be disappointed. He doesn’t roundhouse so much as loiter. Instead, Day of Reckoning falls back on a bevy of marshals, mercenaries, and some “Sons of Anarchy” cosplay, hoping a grimace and a shotgun will make up for missing charisma.
The action, such as it is, is more perfunctory than pulse-pounding. Guns get waved, blanks get fired, but there’s none of the kinetic grace Adkins so often supplies in better projects. The requisite final showdown arrives like an Amazon package you never ordered: underwhelming, padded by filler, and insulted by a soundtrack that, for reasons known only to the gods and the producers, is wall-to-wall Yelawolf. His tracks appear and disappear at random, lurching into scenes like an uninvited uncle at a family reunion. Whose creative decision was it to rap over a cattle stampede?
What keeps the movie from slumping into total chaos are the few, the proud, the competent: Cara Jade Myers, stealing scenes with an actual human performance, and Billy Zane, who credit where it’s due, leans into his age, his weary glare suggesting a man who’s spent a few too many dawns watching bad scripts slide across his desk. Adkins, when he’s allowed, works hard to generate tension just by standing still. But even he seems at a loss as the script pages flop by, each one recycling dialogue borrowed from a thousand other cable westerns. Everyone else is varying shades of replaceable, standing around waiting to squint and scowl.
The plot? Frankly, if you’ve seen a cable western any time in the past decade, you know every beat before the horses arrive. Crooked lawmen. Double crosses. A female outlaw with more brains than the entire posse, yet stuck playing decoy to the next round of gunplay. You have to wonder how many industry photocopiers broke down cranking out these pages, each character a xerox of a xerox. A scene that could’ve seized the film, a standoff in a crumbling barn under the moonlight winds up so covered in shadows and garbled dialogue, you lose track of who’s holding whom at gunpoint and why.
If you squint, you might find pleasure here. Some will claim the blood squibs and folksy gunblasts offer old-school comfort food, but let’s be honest: most viewers are going to find this a long and flavorless sit. The movie isn’t incompetent, exactly. Plenty of scenes are passable, and nothing truly falls apart on a technical level. But “competence” isn’t why you hire Scott Adkins, or revive Billy Zane as a tongue-in-cheek baddie. You want electricity, not a slow trickle of static.
That said, maybe for some, the rural corniness is as comforting as the white bread in a prison lunch. There’s a certain market that wants to see outlaws in dusters, wagons in the moonlight, and pistol duels at dawn, regardless of dramatic effort or novelty. For those who come for that, well, you’ll get it, even if you could predict every exchange before the first yelp of Yelawolf’s soundtrack.
But for the rest of us, especially anyone hoping for a Scott Adkins actioner worthy of his considerable skill and presence, Day of Reckoning is a marathon of shrugging, waiting, and wincing at rap songs played over limp shootouts. Even as a time-killer, it’s slow to die.
Sometimes, waiting for the promised action is itself the most grueling stunt of all. That’s not reckoning. That’s just marking time.
