I'm Holding Out For The Hero Till The End Of The Niiiiiight

The past can be a daunting presence in one's life in varying ways. Sometimes it's a past full of happier memories that feel much more enticing than more dreary modern day circumstances, other times it's a wasted past full of missed opportunities that keep one up at night. Whatever kind of past is haunting your psyche, it's likely being so fixated on the events of the past is preventing you from fully appreciating the present, a corny axiom that has more than a kernel of truth to it. In The Hero, the titular lead character is having his own past loom large over his present day situation, though how he grapples with that issue results in some erratically paced cinema.


In Western cinema, few names stand as tall or as recognizable as Lee Hayden (Sam Elliot), a guy who was a big name in the 1970's and 1980's and now stands as an infrequently hired actor whose best moments come when he shares drugs with his drug dealer Jeremy (Nick Offerman). His career going nowhere, his relationship with his daughter Lucy (Krysten Ritter) fractured thanks to him being mostly absent from her childhood, things are already going pretty poorly for Lee before he gets the news that he's contracted a form of Cancer that has an incredibly low survival rate, a revelation that sends him even deeper into despair.

The Hero follows Lee as he comes to terms with the life-threatening disease he's contacted (he gets diagnosed in one of the first scenes of the film), though he doesn't tell another soul about his condition. What he does do in lieu of informing his family of his dwindling health is get into all sorts of antics like trying to patch things up with his daughter (that doesn't go so well), attempt to go to a movie audition, strike up a relationship with the significantly younger stand-up comedian Charlotte (Laura Prepon) and inadvertently go viral while giving an awards acceptance speech while under the influence of Molly.

There's a languid pacing to The Hero that proves to be as much of a virtue for the movie as it is a weakness. In its best moments, that unhurried pace allows the looming prospect of death for the protagonist to really hit home as Lee contemplates what his legacy really will be as an actor, as a father and as a person. Of course, Sam Elliot's performance pulls most of the heavy lifting in these moments, as he really excels in this role and particularly finds himself doing exceptional work in the most subtle moments where all we, the viewer, have to go on in terms of figuring out what's going on in our lead characters head is Sam Elliot's haunted facial expressions.

A less relaxed pace likely wouldn't have allowed for those kinds of subdued moments of reflection that Sam Elliot works so well with but I'm sure you could have had both those more introspective segments of the feature combined with a story that isn't so flat and too often hard to get invested in. I'd say a lot of this comes down to the characters, who, for the most part, aren't all that compelling to spend multiple dialogue-heavy sequences with. Charlotte, for instance, doesn't enhance or add much to Lee as a character, she doesn't force him to make sacrifices for her that make him a better person or anything like that, she's just around to give him a constant cheerleader. Even a brief scene where Lee witnesses some of her stand-up comedy that leans too heavily on jokes about his old age doesn't result in all that much in the way of new revelations about the character; he's mad at her for a little bit and then he abruptly isn't.

Fellow supporting characters Lucy and Jeremy are similarly one-note, though Krysten Ritter and especially Nick Offerman give good enough performances to lend more humanity to the characters than what the script gives them. Even odder than the lack of well-defined characters for Lee to interact with is how the script by Marc Basch and Brett Haley keeps swinging back-and-forth between more high-concept thoughtful elements (like recurring dreams Lee has about being in a movie) and more unentertaining broader elements like a weird fixation on mining humor simply out of the sight of elderly people doing drugs. The fact that the more wistful elements concerning Lee Hayden in his lowest and most reflective points and Sam Elliot's performance work so well makes these unsatisfactory elements of The Hero stand out. Overall, it's a decent and watchable movie with some well-handled moments of contemplation and a noteworthy lead performance, but The Hero just can't make the leap from zero to hero.