Jesus. When I decided to watch every single movie Bill Paxton did in his lifetime, I knew going into it there were probably going to be duds. Look, ma, I found one!
Red Wing is a 2013 film that takes a 19th century French novella and updates it into a bizarre American redneck incest tale as a great love story. That might sound enticing, but they somehow made even that boring. A married woman (Breann Johnson as “Maddie Blanton”) meets and raises a 9-year old orphan boy who grows up into bo-hunk Glen Powell and then she says, “Hells, yes, I’ma marry that boy I done raised!” Yee haw.
Yes, okay. Technically, it’s not incest. He isn’t biologically her son. She doesn’t legally adopt him. But it’s definitely incest-adjacent, and the creepy factor is still high. She raises him, is the closest thing he’s ever known to a mother. And all he wants is to marry her. Somebody call Freud.
Bill Paxton’s total screen time (as rancher-with-daughter “Jim Verret”) is less than 10 minutes, and he doesn’t even appear until about 53 minutes into the movie, when Glen Powell’s “Francis” gets kicked off the farm by Maddie’s husband Carl (Luke Perry), who suspects him of having an affair with his wife. Verret takes the boy-man in, gives him a job and a place to live, and hell, even lets him fuck his daughter and steal his truck. Paxton’s moustache and ten-gallon cowboy hat fail to hide his boredom, and his dialogue doesn’t challenge him at all. His character serves little purpose and vanishes from the script almost as suddenly as he appeared. Bill, did you lose a bet on this one? This role could have been performed by nearly anyone.
Luke Perry is fun to watch as a drunken redneck asshole, but he dies in the first half of the film. Likewise for Frances Fisher, who plays the family bitch before kicking off and passing the torch to her son Carl. [By the way, this film marks the second time Paxton and Fisher have appeared in a film together, although they share no screen time here. The first was Titanic, where they also shared no scenes.]
The second half of the film is mostly the camera watching all the female characters eye-fuck Glen Powell, often while he’s half-naked. He has (assumed) sex with the farmer’s daughter, then actively flirts with his “cousin”, who then gets pissed at him for falling in love with his mama, and runs off and marries some guy and works in a laundromat. Could this movie be any more of a white-trash southern cliche?
I need a shower and two screenings of Weird Science to wash myself clean of this sin. If you’re a Bill Paxton fan, you can safely skip this one.
Oh, and by the way: this film, with its nearly two-hour run time, never tells us what “red wing” means. Am I supposed to understand that intuitively? In my mind, it’s a reference to either Star Wars or maxi-pads. My imagination shudders to consider the implications given this film’s plot.
If you really feel the need to take this one in, it’s currently streaming for free on Tubi.
