Northern Frontier: Mounties, Bad Guys, and Plenty of Trees

Is it worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for grainy, old-fashioned B-westerns where the morality is as black and white as the film stock, you’ll probably dig this. It’s not going to blow your mind or make you rethink cinema, but it’s a decent way to kill an hour if you like the smell of pine trees and the sound of horses clopping on dirt.

If you need modern pacing or characters who actually have complex inner lives, skip it. You’ll be bored to tears by the second act.

The whole thing feels like it was filmed in a frantic weekend, which honestly adds to the charm. There is this one scene where a character is trying to look menacing, but he keeps tripping over his own spurs. It’s barely noticeable, but once you see it, you can’t look away.

The Mountie uniform is always a nice touch, though. It’s so stiff it looks like it’s holding the actor up.

Bits and bobs

• The dialogue is mostly just people shouting exposition at each other while riding horses.
• The counterfeiters seem surprisingly well-funded for guys hiding in a shack in the middle of nowhere.
• I’m pretty sure one of the extras in the background is just reading a newspaper during a shootout.

It reminds me a bit of the simplicity in Quicker'n Lightnin', though that one had a bit more punch to its stunts. Here, the action is more of a polite disagreement that happens to involve guns. Sometimes the shots go off, and nobody even flinches.

The wilderness scenery is actually pretty great, even if the cameras weren't quite up to capturing the scale of it. There’s a quiet moment where the wind picks up in the trees, and for a second, the movie feels like a documentary instead of a crime thriller. Then someone starts talking again and pulls you right back out.

It’s not a masterpiece. It’s not even a great movie. But it exists, and it knows exactly what it is. 🌲🐎