The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
★★½ — The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Quirky for quirky's sake is a trap, and the Coens walk right into it here. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs arrives with all the hallmarks you'd hope for from Joel and Ethan: gorgeous wide-open landscapes, dialogue that crackles, a pitch-black sense of humour and a willingness to go somewhere unexpected. And yet, somewhere across its six segments and what feels like a very long evening, the whole thing just doesn't hold together the way it should.
The problem with anthologies, and this one is no exception, is that you're essentially rolling the dice six times. A couple of those rolls land beautifully. The opening segment, the one built around the singing, gun-slinging Buster Scruggs himself, has a gleeful, cartoonish cruelty to it that sets your expectations sky-high. And then the Surly Joe segment arrives and genuinely delivers: dark, funny, sharply paced, with a nastiness that feels earned rather than affected. That's the Coens I want. That's the version of this film I wished I'd been watching all the way through.
But then there are the other segments. Some meander pleasantly without really going anywhere. Others feel like they've been stretched well past the point where the idea ran out. There's a frustrating sense throughout that you're watching a collection of short films that got bundled together partly because none of them were quite big enough to stand alone, and partly because the Coens fancied a wander through the Western genre without the discipline that a single, sustained narrative demands. Compare this to True Grit, where every scene earns its place and the whole thing builds relentlessly. Here, the structure actively works against the momentum.
The visuals, I'll grant them, are often stunning. The American West has rarely looked more beautiful or more merciless, and there are individual images here that'll stick with you. The Coens clearly love this landscape and what it can mean, cinematically and morally. But pretty pictures can only carry you so far when the storytelling underneath keeps losing its nerve or its focus.
What's genuinely frustrating is that the wit is still there, in flashes. The dialogue still sings when the Coens let it. There are moments scattered throughout where you get a reminder of just how good they are at this genre, how well they understand its conventions and exactly where to stick the knife for maximum effect. I loved what they did with the Western's moral universe in Blood Simple, that sense of a world with its own brutal logic. You get glimpses of something similar here, but it never quite crystallises into anything you can hold onto.
I don't think this is a bad film. It's too well made, too intermittently brilliant for that. But it's uneven in a way that feels less like a bold artistic choice and more like a lack of editorial discipline. The best segments make you hungry for more. The weaker ones make you check how much runtime is left. For a filmmaking duo this accomplished, that inconsistency is genuinely disappointing.
If you've seen everything else they've made and you're working your way through the catalogue, by all means give it a go. There's enough here to justify the time, and the Surly Joe segment alone is worth seeing. But if you're after the Coens at their sharpest and most focused, this isn't where I'd point you. It's a curio, a side road, an experiment that half works. Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-04-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Joel Coen: Blood Simple (1984) · True Grit (2010) · Raising Arizona (1987) · Burn After Reading (2008)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
