1 out of 5

Directed by: Paolo Barzman

I’m being overly harsh on this, but… am I? Let me first carve out a common aside: that I don’t know what it takes to make a TV show or movie, and that there are talented people involved in this project – a creator whose work I’ve enjoyed; a director who’s on plenty of great TV shows; and actors who on the main Earp show and others have been highlights. So I don’t mean to suggest that this thing is a stinker in all regards. However, Vengeance – the straight-to-streaming movie length followup to Wynona Earp, after the cancellation of the show – immediately seems split on being a pitch to new viewers and complete fan service that it sets up a bad tonal precedent for its 90 minutes which, far from being dismissed, gets furthered. What I watched had me asking questions along that What Are You Aiming For? axes, such as: is this meant to be camp? Is it meant to lean into its clearly low budget? And there were too many dodges for me to be able to answer those questions effectively.

Vengeance surely is fan service, just in terms of characters popping up; and smoldering looks between pairs Wynona (Melanie Scrofano) and Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon), and Earp’s sister Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and her wife Nicole (Katherine Barrell); but it also fails on that by excluding some characters, or including them in a “we didn’t know what else to do” way, and feigning amnesia to preceding years of story except for the briefest blips that also trigger that same “we didn’t know what else to do” feeling. It’s as though creator / writer Emily Andras crafted the script only from recent memories. To be fair, WE has always played loose with continuity, but that’s not even the issue here so much as feeling like the continuity doesn’t even exist. Again, it’s just this weird split difference between playing to new and old viewers, which the show tries to lampshade in an empty dialogue moment asking if this is a reboot or sequel.

Regarding that dialogue: we do get some key exchanges between characters, allowing for our actors to shine. All the stuff inbetween, though…? There was some sparkle to the first couple seasons of Wynona’s snark, and the series’ speedrun of lore; later seasons, there was a lot of indulgence, but the familiarity of the crew with one another, and a nice drip of interesting ideas, kept things chugging along. Vengeance posits a wholly new baddie from Wynona’s past and boils Earp’s (and Doc’s, and Waverly’s, and Haught’s) snark down to teenager madlibs, just erring towards swearing or scatalogy without much logic. If the delivery sold this stuff, fine, but that’s the surprising and unfortunate other piece that falls down: outside of some of those more intimate moments, this is one-take territory. We can blame the budget, and perhaps when you get a seasoned crew back together, there’s less thought towards direction of a scene, but the timing of the conversations, and the beats, are off. They’re too casual, in a way that lacks the somewhat necessary pantomime of TV / movies. It’s nice that everyone had a good time hanging out, but it’s at the expense of a compelling viewing.

Regarding the story, since we have the aforementioned new baddie (Karen Knox), combined with this casual vibe and imbalanced new / returning viewer aim, there’s zero chance for this to develop into something with stakes beyond the stakes we’re told it has, and this role – alongside a new Black Badger – aren’t given the story or pacing support they need to become compelling characters; it’s hard to assess the actors’ abilities when the material is lacking. But zooming out futher and just talking about story, Vengeance unfortunately is just an extended bottle episode. Viewing this as a movie level event is unfortunate optics, and you can absolutely feel the buffer spreading this episode out to feature length.

Lastly, let me pick on something somewhat unavoidably limiting: budget. Earp is an action-based show; Vengeance surely had, like, 0 budget to even do squibs, or effective CGI gunshots. We’re doing offscreen shootings. The supernatural baddies are old school Doctor Who villains. On the one hand – you do what you can with what you’ve got, and I appreciate the ingenuity of using camera tricks to depict Hell, and those Doctor Who villains are a 100% great use of wardrobe. But until / unless you tell me a story where this thing started out with a bigger budget and got knocked down at the last second, I question scripting these elements unless you could support them. And director Paolo Barzman and his crew don’t help matters: the framing is wide open, and pretty casually (there’s that word again) edited, but not in a fashion that necessarily plays into a B-movie vibe. I respect how difficult of a task this was, to write something satisfying for Earpers while only having an Arby’s giftcard to spend; I guess I just wish / would hope some more creativity was applied to get us here, and spare the large cringe factor I experienced throughout.

Do I want more Earp? Yes. Even at a reduced budget, there’s a cheeky PG-13 Eerie, Indiana show to be had here, but I’d want to see something with a more definitive sense of it self. If Vengeance is the stepping stone to get us there, fair enough, though I’ll have no reason to revisit this entry beyond (self-)forced binge rewatches.