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“The English,” a new six-part mini-series on Prime Video, is a Western about outsiders made by an outsider. There’s always a bit of a different flavor when someone not from the United States tackles the most homegrown of genres, the Western. And one can feel the influence of Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western all over Brit Hugo Blick ’s captivating drama, a show that bursts out of the gate with two of the best episodes of TV this year before getting a bit too languid and talky in its mid-section. Thankfully, it regains its footing, and never loses its visual confidence or style even through the slow stuff. This is a drama about lands shaped by violence and eroded by vengeance, a genre exercise with fantastic performances and film-caliber technical elements. Western fans definitely won’t want to miss it.

After a prologue that details the tumultuous state of existence in middle America in 1890, “The English” thrusts its two protagonists together in a long scene of fateful twists. Lady Cornelia Locke ( Emily Blunt ) arrives in the United States to avenge the death of her son but is immediately threatened by greedy, violent criminals played marvelously by Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds . As she’s thrown from the carriage to Hinds’ feet, she sees the figure of a beaten man hanging at the edge of the property. It is Eli Whipp ( Chaske Spencer ), a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout who now intends to get his promised land from the government he fought for even though he knows in his heart that he’s unlikely to get it easily. These are both people pushing back against a broken system, one that rewards the greedy and the unjust, and they will end up essentially on the road together to a small town called Hoxem, Wyoming.

This mini-Deadwood in Wyoming is led (barely) by a sheriff named Robert Marshall ( Stephen Rea ), who is stumped by a series of local murders that may involve a young widow named Martha Myers ( Valerie Pachner ). As everything builds toward a series of revelations and showdowns in Hoxem, familiar faces pop up including memorable turns by Rafe Spall and Gary Farmer (so good on “Reservation Dogs”). Much of “The English” consists of long dialogue exchanges punctuated by extreme violence. It’s a fascinating equation as this is essentially a show about people who believe that they will only get what they want by force and yet it’s also remarkably rich in dialogue and character interaction. The opening episode conversation between Hinds and Blunt over a dinner table that includes prairie oysters (look it up) isn’t as self-aware as Quentin Tarantino but recalls similar exchanges in his films like “Django Unchained” and “ Inglourious Basterds ”—scenes in which you know all the witty back and forth is probably going to end in bloodshed.

Blick sometimes indulges a bit too much in these lengthy exchanges, especially in episodes three and four, and he allows the storytelling to get cluttered in flashbacks when the season needs to be building momentum after its explosive opening episodes. However, through it all, the show remains a visually engaging experience. Blick and his team are very interested in iconic Western imagery—silhouettes against a big blue sky, close-ups of furtive eyes, etc.—but also in digging beneath the imagery to the truth of a land of broken promises, both those made to the people told they could start a new life there and the ones whose land was stolen. Late in the season, someone speaks of the difference between traveling with hope vs. just traveling without fear, and it feels like a show about a time in America when hope was in very short supply. Some travelers to new communities like Hoxem may have traveled without fear, but it wasn’t because they hoped for a bright future as much as they had no other choice.

Even as “The English” sags a bit in terms of storytelling, the performances remain stellar through the season. Hinds and Jones have a blast in their episode, and Rea is typically strong, but the show belongs to Blunt and Spencer, who are both phenomenal. Blunt has always been able to balance vulnerability and strength, and those two traits exist in the same beat in some of her choices here in a captivating way. Spencer understands how to carry regret in his body and his tone, capturing a man who may be numbed by what he’s seen perpetrated on his people but hasn’t allowed that to overwhelm his decency. They both have such wonderful voices, which give “The English” the air of classic genre cinema at times if you close your eyes. Every time that Blunt and Spencer start volleying dialogue, it's easy to just get lost in this show.

The streaming mini-series has become such an oversaturated field that something like “The English” could get lost in the crowd. Like the characters it profiles, it deserves a chance at happiness and to carve out some of the landscape for itself.

Premieres on Prime Video on Friday, November 11 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

The English (2022)

300 minutes

Emily Blunt as Cornelia Locke

Chaske Spencer as Eli Whipp

Stephen Rea as Robert Marshall

Valerie Pachner as Martha Myers

Ciaran Hinds

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Never Mind the Bollocks Plot of ‘The English.’ This Show Is All About the Acting

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

In the final days of 2014, my wife and I both came down with a nasty case of the flu. Unable to do much but alternately shiver and sweat in bed together, we attempted to distract ourselves with a miniseries I had heard good things about earlier in the year: The Honourable Woman . Written and directed by Hugo Blick, the thriller starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as an Anglo-Jewish businesswoman caught up in a web of intrigue that involved, among other things, a kidnapping, Israeli intelligence officers, and, I think, fiber optic cables? To be honest, while we loved Gyllenhaal’s performance, along with the sense of mounting tension and the visual style, we had a lot of trouble following the plot, frequently pausing episodes to ask each other exactly what was happening. We just couldn’t tell if this was a side effect of our temporary delirium, or a flaw in Blick’s storytelling.

The experience of watching The English while healthy, though, proved roughly the same as bingeing The Honourable Woman from a sick bed. Blunt is fantastic, as are many of her co-stars. The whole thing looks gorgeous, and it has some thoughtful variations on Blick’s pet theme about what happens when people from one culture get mixed up in the affairs of another. But despite a seemingly straightforward revenge plot, its storytelling frequently turns too complicated for its own good.

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As the menacing Mr. Watts (Ciaran Hinds) — the first of many threats standing between Cornelia and her final target — puts it, she is “Not quite the woman I expected.”

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But this turns out to be a Trojan Horse situation where the horse winds up being more useful than the soldiers hiding inside it. Blunt and Spencer are just so charismatic, both together and in the stretches of the season when they are separated, that the show’s loftier ambitions begin to feel besides the point. Blick and cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer also place their two leads into a series of gorgeous compositions. (Sometimes, it’s literally painterly, like making Cornelia appear to be in a watercolor as she arrives at Watts’ place, or turning Cornelia and Eli’s discussion of constellations into something very much meant to evoke Van Gogh’s Starry Night .) The whole thing is great to look at.

It is also, though, a great headache to follow much of the time. While many of the supporting players are colorfully drawn and well played by the likes of Guerrero or (as a frightening bandit queen with a very specific grudge against indigenous people) Nichola McAuliffe, it becomes challenging in a hurry to keep track of everyone’s true motivations — or, at times, even how Cornelia or Eli get from one point of the story to the next. While many streaming shows suffer from not having enough story to fill the allotted episodes, The English often plays as if Blick wrote 12 episodes, then had to squeeze everything into half that, not always gracefully.

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Blick remains a fascinating filmmaker. I would just like to see him try to make something that doesn’t require a Carrie Mathison conspiracy board to fully comprehend.

All six episodes of The English premiere Nov. 11 on Amazon Prime Video. I’ve seen the entire season.

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Amazon’s <i>The English</i> Is a Stunning Western That Reimagines America’s Founding Fantasy

Amazon’s The English Is a Stunning Western That Reimagines America’s Founding Fantasy

F or the Europeans who colonized it in the 19th century, the American West promised money, power, and freedom. Civilization was an afterthought, except within the Indigenous communities that would fall prey to the genocidal ideology of Manifest Destiny. The conflict between ruthless, lawless self-interest and the human instinct to form bonds of mutual care has always been central to the western genre . Yet it’s rare to see a variation on the theme achieve the depth and poignance of The English .

Written and directed by Hugo Blick, the creator of sophisticated, politically engaged British dramas like The Honorable Woman , this insightful Amazon-BBC co-production, which comes to Prime Video on Nov. 11, opens with a chance encounter. Upon arriving at a dusty hotel in the desolate Kansas of 1890, Lady Cornelia Locke ( Emily Blunt ) finds a badly beaten man, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), chained to a post. She’s an English aristocrat on a mission to kill the man who killed her son. He’s a newly retired Pawnee scout traveling to Nebraska to claim land he’s owed under the Homestead Act but—despite and because his ancestors made their homes in the same area—will likely have to take by force. She saves him, then he saves her. They’re strangers, but unlike other strangers who cross paths on these eerily empty plains, they’ve earned each other’s trust.

As they ride north, it slowly becomes apparent that they have more in common than a direction or their loneliness or an increasingly affectionate allyship. Known for the complexity of both his story lines and the moral quagmires he creates, Blick populates three decades’ worth of history surrounding the dual protagonists with often-ghoulish supporting characters who represent all sorts of wild, self-serving beliefs about destiny, loyalty, revenge, ethics, identity. The English makes the argument that these mismatched convictions, forged from the bloody battles fought between Native Americans and European invaders but also within each broadly defined group, converged to form a fantasy known as the United States of America.

TV’s greatest western, Deadwood , arrived at a similar conclusion, paraphrasing an adage attributed to Napoleon as “history is a lie agreed upon.” The story of Cornelia and Eli is a different kind of lie; it’s a fiction, and one whose sentimentality in later installments of the six-episode series barely undermines its beauty as a counter-narrative. Violent, macabre, and in many ways tragic, The English doesn’t deny what we know about what really happened when cultures collided on the frontier. Instead, it finds beauty in imagining how different people in the same situation, driven by purer motives and united by trust, might have built something better.

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‘the english’ review: emily blunt in amazon’s big, bold swing of a western.

Hugo Blick's six-part series pairs Blunt and Chaske Spencer as outsiders seeking revenge on the wide open prairie.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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‘The English’ Review: Emily Blunt in Amazon's Big Swing of a Western

As presented in Hugo Blick ‘s new Amazon limited series The English , the Old West was a dangerous place: a collection of breathtaking vistas connected by trauma from horrifying massacres, in which disease-ridden, testicle-eating outlaws sold their services to the highest bidder and the only currency more valuable than acreage was revenge. No place for a woman, but no place for a man either.

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Emily Blunt’s Ultra-Violent Western ‘The English’ Tells How the West Was Lost

Ben travers.

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If many a Western captures the sweeping romance of America’s land rush — idealizing a time when seizing one’s future involved planting a literal flag — then “ The English ” serves as a bright red rebuttal; a revisionist take among the modern era’s various reconsiderations, this time emphasizing the tears, sweat, and oh-so-much-blood required to reach the dream awaiting colonizers somewhere west of the Mississippi.

Writer-director Hugo Blick (“The Honorable Woman”) still embraces traditional elements of the genre, centering his six-part Prime Video series around a rhapsodic love story and capturing plenty of vast prairies in picturesque, sun-kissed shots. But it’s the edge carved into every corner of “The English” that helps the limited series stand out. From the cutting dialogue to its jagged mystery, Blick’s latest story finds consistent success not by drawing pained parallels between past and present but by astutely acknowledging the ferocity ingrained in America’s identity all along.

The cast is also quite good. Emily Blunt produces and plays Lady Cornelia Locke, an aristocrat from England who arrives in America seeking revenge. Her son has died (under undisclosed circumstances), and she’s tracked those she deems responsible to these parts. Unfortunately, they’ve tracked her as well. Cornelia’s mettle is tested (and flaunted, as any action series featuring Blunt’s intimidating talents should) by a procession of colorful characters played by accomplished character actors, all happy to sink their teeth into spirited dialogue and mythic personalities.

Ciarán Hinds makes for a beguiling, tone-setting first opponent: “There are many who can welcome you to the real America,” Mr. Watts (Hinds) says, “but only one who can truly mean it.” His greeting includes a snazzy green vest, the signature piece of a formal three-piece suit (one of many striking ensembles made by costumer Phoebe De Gaye); a theatrical gesture toward the panoramic vistas in the distance (captured both in stark remove and lush detail by cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer); and courteous responses to her curt inquiries… all until he knocks her out cold in an attempt to steal everything she’s carried over land and sea.

This marks a fitting introduction for Cornelia to America and audiences to the series, as Blick builds early episodes around the alluring, aforementioned formal elements and, more generally, alternating moments of debonair discussions and shocking violence. Cornelia and Watts’ dinner table dialogue crackles with wit. Each actor speaks with infectious confidence and curiosity, and you’ll be chuckling along with them until the next surprise smack reminds you what’s at stake — and who they really are. Toby Jones, Stephen Rea, and Tom Hughes each get their time to shine, but respect must be paid to Rafe Spall for his all-in heel turn. Sporting a helmet-like bowler and speaking in a beefed-up Cockney accent, the late-arriving “Trying” star steadily builds a towering presence that would be too big for nearly any other show. Here, though, he’s just right — a boss you love to hate and hate to love, blending brutish charm and unspeakable savagery into an anti-gentleman who’s still able to flourish in a country that rewards such behavior, so long as a white man embodies them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back when Mr. Watts is welcoming Cornelia to the U.S. of A., just out of eyesight is an Indigenous American, tied up, beaten, and restrained. This is Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee-born ex-cavalry scout who only wants to claim the land that is rightfully his (twice over). Whipp, a man of few but purposeful words, served his time in the Civil War, even looking the other way when his fellow soldiers took out their frustrations, aggression, and fears on Indigenous people. Now, he’s traveling toward Wyoming, where he plans to lay claim to a few acres and build a new life. But if Mr. Watts’ assault doesn’t make this clear already, just about everyone Whipp comes across tells him the same thing: He’s not getting that land. And for the same reason he was attacked and tied up: “The color of his skin,” as Mr. Watts readily admits.

The English Amazon Prime Video Emily Blunt Chaske Spencer

Despite his early predicament, Whipp’s path soon intersects with Cornelia’s. She claims it’s magic — a kind of fate ushered in by necessity and a mutual understanding between two good souls in a nation filled with bad ones. How they’re pulled apart and pushed together again makes up the murky, mysterious middle of an otherwise straightforwardly entertaining six hours (less, since most episodes run close to 50 minutes). “The English” over-complicates its plot at times, which, combined with Blick’s enthralling yet extravagant dialogue, can trip up an otherwise thrilling chase. (I found myself regularly skipping back and forth just to make sense of things — an odd feeling for a show with an easily understood intro and themes so clear they border on overkill.)

But what it may lack in efficiency, it more than makes up for in spirit. Blunt and Spencer create genuine characters out of their archetypes. (He a noble gunslinger who’s hunted where a white war hero would be glorified, she a frilly-dressed homesteader hellbent on vengeance, yet preserving a heart of gold.) “The English,” like the land on which it’s set, is built on contradictions. To describe it as a rollicking good time wouldn’t be far off, even if such unchecked elation doesn’t quite prepare viewers for the heartrending twists and turns. Blick’s latest is far from the first revisionist Western to imply the Wild West wasn’t as clean and proper as genre classics first portrayed, nor is it saying anything particularly profound by outlining how deep the roots of violence go in a country built by fleeing immigrants (and persecuted natives).

And yet those ideas still pack a punch. During the last few years of pandemic denials and political divisions, of COVID body counts and regular school shootings, plenty of modern aristocrats have wondered where our savagery and selfishness stems from; why there’s a tacit acceptance of so many seemingly avoidable deaths in the land of the free. “The English” outlines at least one theory: Bloodshed is the American way, and so is believing we can put it behind us. Blick’s explanation is nestled somewhere within the connection between its graceful aesthetics and ruthless inclinations, its sweeping romance and star-crossed lovers, its white flags and red ones.

“The English” premieres Friday, November 11 on Amazon Prime Video .

The English review: an occasionally transcendent Western

“The English is a narratively messy but consistently engaging Western that is anchored by Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer's spellbinding performances.”

Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer's lead performances
Stunning Western imagery
A memorable villain
Convoluted plotting
A messy finale
Uneven pacing

Cornelia Locke believes in magic. For that reason, the British aristocrat, as played by Emily Blunt, feels uniquely modern in The English . The new limited series from Hugo Blick, which premieres in the U.S. today on Amazon Prime , opens with a flashforward monologue from Blunt about the power of fate. and its first episode concludes with Cornelia boasting about her star sign (she’s a Scorpio because, of course, she is) and sharing her belief in the magic of the universe. The English ’s premiere also makes it clear that Cornelia is a woman on a dangerous mission, a fact that adds a surprising edge to her more eccentric astrological beliefs.

The English is at its best when it makes Cornelia’s trust in magic feel justified. Like many great Westerns , there’s a deep spirituality running throughout The English that adds layers of predetermined weight and tragedy to its story. Across its six episodes, the series frequently makes its own life harder than it needs to be by presenting a fairly straightforward plot in an unnecessarily convoluted way. However, whenever it feels like The English has grown too unwieldy for its creative team, its two stars return to keep it from floating away.

The English tells, in many ways, a simple revenge story. Its first episode introduces Blunt’s Cornelia Locke and then reveals that she, like so many Western heroes before her, has come to the American West of the 1890s looking to right a wrong as violently as she can. We’re told that she’s looking to kill the man responsible for the death of her son, though Cornelia’s actual target is a mystery that The English holds on to for as long as possible. In order to get her revenge, Cornelia requires the help of a Pawnee scout named Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer).

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When Cornelia and Eli first cross paths, the latter is just a few months into his retirement from the U.S. military, which he dutifully served for many years. The pair initially seem like they could not be any more different from each other, but the further into The English ’s story we get, the more we realize just how much they actually have in common. Despite their racial, social, and cultural differences, a bond quickly forms between the two that emerges as both the thematic backbone and emotional foundation of The English ’s admittedly messy story.

Fortunately, both Spencer and Blunt are performers who are more than capable of carrying a series like The English . Blunt, for her part, is given the chance to play one of her best roles in years here. The Quiet Place star brings authenticity to every side of Cornelia, whether it be her hard-edged ruthlessness, wholehearted belief in the supernatural, devastating sadness, or charming wit. It’s hard, in fact, to think of a project that has given Blunt more to do than The English , but the series is better off because it does.

Opposite her, Spencer brings a commanding presence to The English . The actor is spellbinding as Eli Whipp, a Pawnee man whose time in the military has instilled both a deep confidence and a profound sense of guilt within him. Spencer’s performance is one built on a series of micro-expressions and sideways glances that, when combined together, make Eli’s complicated past and conflicting inner emotions clear even beneath his ceaselessly calm, collected persona.

Outside of Spencer and Blunt, Rafe Spall gives an oddly entrancing performance as a character whose role in The English is probably best left unspoiled. Other recognizable actors like Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds turn in reliably memorable performances in otherwise minor, thankless roles. Meanwhile, as its sole director, Hugo Blick fills The English with enough striking images and fittingly sun-soaked compositions to cement the series as one of the more artistically composed Westerns of recent memory .

Blick’s writing does not, however, match the consistency of his directing. The English ’s final two episodes, in particular, unfold in ways that often feel confusing, if not downright incoherent. After introducing one of the more awful TV villains of the year, Blick’s final script for The English fails to deliver the kind of resoundingly cathartic conclusion that the series deserves. That particular failure is partly due to Blick’s overall misuse of a superfluous character played by A Hidden Life star Valerie Pachner.

Despite these flaws, The English is a largely successful, occasionally excellent Western. Even in its worst moments, most of which arrive in its finale, the series still feels like a unique addition to a genre that Hollywood has essentially chosen to ignore in recent years. The show is also, even more importantly, a reminder of what kind of shots actors like Blunt and Spencer can take when they’re given the tools and space that they deserve. The English , to its credit, wisely chooses more often than not to stay out of its stars’ way, which is ultimately why it works as well as it does.

The English is now streaming on Prime Video. Digital Trends was given early access to all six of its episodes.

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‘The English’ Review: Emily Blunt Is Hell-Bent on Revenge in Uneven Prime Video Western

The new limited series hails from “The Honourable Woman” writer/director Hugo Blick

Until I watched all six episodes of Amazon Prime Video’s overstuffed limited series “The English,” I believed I’d follow Emily Blunt just about anywhere. As it turns out, maybe not to the American West circa 1890. In writer/director Hugo Blick’s uneven revisionist Western, she plays Lady Cornelia Locke. The tragic British aristocrat travels across the pond hell-bent on revenge following her child’s untimely death under mysterious circumstances, largely explained in an insufferable voiceover.

Once on the plains, the handsome horsewoman and amateur archer becomes a target for almost any bounder she meets. Her bagful of cash that keeps falling open makes her no less conspicuous. On her travels, she encounters, and sets free, another searcher: Ex-Cavalry Scout Eli Whipp. Played by a terrific Chaske Spencer (“Twilight” actor Sam Uley), he’s a Pawnee who’s lived straddling two worlds and now hopes to return to his native Nebraska, while settling old scores along the way.

What we have here is a Western where the most dynamic characters are a woman and a Native American. That’s a plus on its face – a different look at how the West was won. In many ways, “The English” harkens back to the classic Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns – the expansive vistas of virgin land, the big sky, the Ennio Morricone-style soundtrack, the long silences and its focus on that great theme of the West: Revenge.

the-crown-season-5-elizabeth-debicki-diana

In its overt brutality and constant threat of rape and dismemberment, it adds in a dash of Quentin Tarantino circa “The Hateful Eight” or “Django Unchained.” There’s an excess of raw scalps here – and you can see them in their juicy grotesqueness.

Attractive, mumbling Englishman Tom Hughes (he played Albert to Jenna Coleman’s “Victoria”) winds in and out of the story as Lady Cornelia’s former fiancé, Thomas Trafford. He has long ago left her to make his fortune in America as a rancher, and he echoes Benedict Cumberbatch’s tortured cowboy in “The Power of the Dog.”

And if that wasn’t enough crammed in, there’s also a historical romance with all the trimmings. Lady Cornelia and Whipp, opposites in social standing, citizenship and temperament, gradually come together under star-dappled skies. Could they be soul mates? Is there any world where this couple has a future together? If the actors playing them weren’t such charm pills, it would be hard to imagine.

While the overarching series is uneven, there are some great moments where British actors have a chance to chew the scenery in splendor. In one of these, Ciaran Hinds (“Belfast”) plays a mustache-twirling villain in a dandy green vest and a tailored suit so much more proper than his behavior. The Lady becomes his captive, and he insists she wear her fanciest red silk and join him for a dinner with a prairie oyster appetizer. In a great moment of culinary TV, he gets a full minute to put the enormous bulls’ balls in his mouth, and munch, munch, munch with accompanying sound effects.

The highly regarded character actor Toby Jones (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”) gets dusty as a wily coachman playing all sides against each other. Stephen Rea (“The Crying Game”) makes for a marvelously underplayed Marshall. Rafe Spall plays the uber-nasty rapist and murderer David Melmont.

All of those characters are relatively stock but that’s not the case for the rampaging villainess Black-Eyed Mog (Nichola McAuliffe) who tries to block Lady Cornelia’s quest. Having been taken prisoner by Native Americans, Mog’s carrying a grudge the size of Wyoming: beneath her cap is scarred bare scalp, underneath her dark glasses are wide eyes shorn of lids, forever stuck in a state of horror.

The Western, as it crisscrosses the frontier, culminates in a pile-up of coincidences, revelations and plot shockers. There’s much too much baggage. If there’s a message that the series could have taken to heart it was this from Whipp. The Pawnee tells the Englishwoman that the difference between what you need and what you want comes down to what you can carry on a single horse. If only this mini-series burdened with giant aspirations would have taken his message about traveling light to heart.

“The English” debuts on Amazon Prime on Nov. 11 .

'The English' Centers Humanity in the Vast Western Frontier | Review

With its gritty, lived-in atmosphere, the series never loses sight of what's at the heart of this tragic tale.

The American West is a dangerous place for a woman, but so is England and the façade of safety that it offers women—even for wealthy, privileged women like Cornelia Locke ( Emily Blunt ). The English doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the 1890s, but it also carefully avoids turning its portrayal of period-typical violence, racism, and sexism into voyeuristic fodder. Across the six-episode limited series, writer-director Hugo Blick delivers a very even-keeled, but rarely glossy Western that interweaves Locke’s thirst for revenge with Eli Whipp’s ( Chaske Spencer ) own journey, as they come together to brave the bloody and cruel plains.

Their first encounter is one of sheer chance. Shortly after her arrival in Wyoming, Locke happens upon Whipp, near death and left out to hang, and they forge a wholly unexpected friendship (with tinges of something more). They both have more emotional baggage than could easily fill their saddlebags, with Locke’s entire journey centering around her desire for vengeance against the man responsible for her son’s death and her own, even more personal tragedy, and Whipp’s mission to reclaim the land owed to him for his service during the war being marred by the realities that law and order aren’t always honored in the West—especially not for someone born within the Pawnee Nation. The English manages to explore the effects of violent, white patriarchy, with both characters, showing how both Locke and Whipp bear its scars. They both tried to play the game, to fall in line and do what was expected of them, but they both ultimately suffer.

Blunt is no stranger to playing posh aristocrats thrown into dangerous new adventures , but paired with the chemistry she shares with Spencer, The English gives her a chance to elevate her performance to a new echelon. That elevation is reciprocated in Spencer, who may have finally landed a role that allows him to escape the far-reaching shadow of the Twilight Saga . He gives a very compelling performance as Whipp, given room within the material to explore the many facets of the character and push back against some period-typical stereotypes. As much as she is seeking revenge, and he is looking to reclaim land, he is similarly looking for revenge against those who have acted against him, while she is looking to reclaim a sense of self that has been stolen from her.

RELATED: New ‘The English’ Footage Sees Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer Headed Down a Violent Path

The English dances around the chemistry between Blunt and Spencer, only ever really toeing the line of intimacy between the unlikely duo, but at least the plot serves up a convincing reason why their could-be romance is relegated to longing looks and lingering touches. Romantics who swoon at the Pride & Prejudice hand touch will be pleased with what little scraps of affection are allowed between Locke and Whipp.

The series also looks to unravel most of the plot through flashback-heavy episodes that help to piece together the initial information unloaded in the first episode. While there is never any doubt about who Locke and Whipp are as people, it’s through exposition that characters like Thomas Trafford ( Tom Hughes ) are explored, but never quite as far as they could have been. No matter how vast and treacherous the West might be, The English ’s cast of characters are all inherently linked to each other and have no issue crossing paths with each other. To some, this might seem implausible, but it helps to strengthen this idea of the human struggle during this period. No matter how far these characters travel, the impact that they had on others follows them to the grave.

As much as The English is perfectly suited for fans of historical dramas or Westerns, the limited series also caters to an unexpected demographic: fans of Red Dead Redemption . Cornelia Locke’s often fantastical wardrobe looks like it was procured at the general store in Valentine, while some ne'er-do-wells she encounters conjure up warm memories of tracking down bounties, dealing with the O'Driscoll Boys, and exploring the vastness of the wild west. There is another aspect of Locke’s storyline that mirrors Arthur Morgan’s story, which delivers the same emotional devastation as The English draws to a close.

While The English caught my attention with its cast and plot, it fully won me over with its expertly crafted soundtrack. Federico Jusid ’s score is sublime, but how often do you stumble upon a Western that knows Mazzy Star’s somber crooner “Fade Into You” is the perfect backdrop to a hopeless relationship?

There is a lot to love in this six-episode limited series, but it does ultimately leave you wanting more. Blick’s dialogue is keenly crafted, blending harsh realities with endearing sentiments, while giving Blunt and Spencer the lion’s share of material to cut their teeth on. Blick keeps the script very pared-down, abiding by the old style of Westerns that relied heavily on physical performance over spoken performances. The English resonates with its gritty, lived-in atmosphere, and it never loses sight of the humanity at the heart of this tragic tale. No matter how brutal, how bloody, how blistering the quest for vengeance and reclamation is, the unbreakable bonds forged between characters remain center stage.

The English premieres November 11 on Prime Video.

Emily Blunt’s ‘The English’ Is a Punishing, Stunning Western Revenge Tale

Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer are fantastic in Prime Video’s new series, elevating an intentionally murky mystery into an unforgettable, six-part Western epic.

Coleman Spilde

Entertainment Critic

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Amazon Studios

The American West of the 1890s was an unforgiving and cruel place. Land, freedom, and happiness were hard-fought but never guaranteed amidst the greed of white colonialists carrying out the twisted and genocidal tenets of Manifest Destiny. The West was sparse, as were the rewards, and every day brought a new, unexpected battle. Making a life in the post-Civil War plains was an uncharitable undertaking for a pitiless people.

At times, writer/director Hugo Blick’s epic six-episode western The English , out Friday on Prime Video, can feel a lot like that: sprawling and demanding, an almost thankless task. It is not an easy watch by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps that’s what makes the payoff so sizable.

Despite its near-insurmountable density, The English ends six protracted hours as one of the year’s most memorable series, thanks largely in part to its astounding two leads. Emily Blunt stars as Lady Cornelia Locke, an English noblewoman who arrives in the post-war wasteland of the American West with an unyielding taste for revenge. Her destiny binds her to Chaske Spencer’s Eli Whipp, a Pawnee ex-Army scout who has spent most of his life serving his own interests to stay alive.

Blunt and Spencer have a captivating onscreen chemistry. Eli and Cornelia find themselves undeniably linked by a moment in time—a dose of magic that brought them together, as Cornelia says—and watching them uncover the mystery of their shared past is what keeps The English from buckling under its massive scope. This pair of marvelous performances, and the breathtaking technicolor landscapes they’re splashed against, come together to help The English transcend its overstuffed writing, turning the series into an unmissable modern Western.

Diego Lopez Calvin/Prime Video

“Without you, I’d have been killed,” Cornelia says in a voiceover, opening the series. “That’s how we met, that’s why we met. It was in the stars.” When Cornelia first sees Eli, he’s been tied up and held prisoner for the crime of ordering a drink at a white man’s hotel. There’s no actual criminality in Eli’s request. But in a lawless land, a wrong move has put him in the right place for destiny to intervene.

Cornelia has been in America for weeks, using bags of unbanked cash to help her navigate a strange land. She pays off anyone she can to take her further. Her offer to pay for Eli’s release is refused with an assault by the hotelier, knocking her out and sending Eli, handcuffed in a stagecoach, in the other direction. But when a chance encounter leads to Eli’s escape, he returns to Cornelia, by way of a knife in her captor’s back.

Thus, the two are bound by bloodshed. Cornelia knows that the success of her mission hinges on her skills with a gun; she’s seeking revenge on the man she believes killed her son, and her festering anger can only do so much without the proper tools. Eli, torn between the life he had before joining an army cavalry and his post-war insularity decides to join Cornelia to reclaim Pawnee land and see the demise of its colonizers along the way. From that moment, Cornelia and Eli have united in something bigger than themselves, a violent, cosmic mystery that will set forth a chain of events that was in place long before the two of them ever met.

To understand that mystery, you’ll be tasked with a daunting voyage of your own: completing all six episodes.

By the end of the first, you’ll be forgiven if you don’t understand what’s going on. I spent a great deal of The English unsure of exactly what I was supposed to be taking from each episode, trying so hard to ascertain the purpose of each of the series’ many detours. The watch can occasionally feel punishing. Masochism is not the foremost feeling we’re seeking from television.

In this Wild West, there are hucksters peddling information like farmed resources; there are killers who ride with freshly-sheared scalps dangling from their horses; there’s a town built on a secret that slowly changes hands as time goes on, complete with English cattle drivers and hard-nosed widows; there’s a woman named Black Eyed Mog, who is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen on television.

Why viewers spend time with these tangential characters is something that doesn’t become clear until the series’ final episodes. Pulling focus away from Spencer and Blunt for these convoluted subplots causes The English ’s operatic nature to hit an off-note, even if it’s intentional. What was sharp and vivid only seconds earlier quickly becomes brittle and, at the risk of being gauche, momentarily boring. But just around the corner is another tremendous thrill.

For a series that is jumbled to the point of near discombobulation, it sure is gorgeous to look at. Aesthetically, everything about The English is sumptuous. Strikingly bright yellow fields cascade across the frame, positioned against blue skies with perfect clouds that look so unbelievably remarkable, they could be paintings. Scenes look like they’re being filmed on location, on a soundstage, and against flat fabric, old Hollywood backdrops. Like Spaghetti Westerns of yore, much of the series was filmed in Europe, along the kaleidoscopic Spanish countryside. Cinematographer Arnau Valls Collomer brings lasting life and warmth to the desolate American plains. Simply speaking: The English is one of the most visually arresting series of the year.

Compounding all of that beauty are Blunt and Spencer, whose performances both beg for there to be a word even more concise than “triumphant” to underscore their brilliance. Part of what makes The English ’s scattered plotlines so frustrating is that, from their very first scenes, we’re all-in on their unlikely dynamic. In just a few frames, Blunt can move between tepidity and the showy courage of a career gunslinger. We feel the depths of her sorrow and her settled ache for revenge; when Cornelia’s motivations come into focus in the latter half of the series, Blunt does some of the best work of her career reminding us just how powerful a mother’s love can be.

And after a long, underappreciated career, Twilight veteran Chaske Spencer leads The English with all the natural grace and formidable talent of the greatest Western actors. He holds Eli’s patchwork of emotions like a deck of cards, playing each one at the exact right time. Somehow, Spencer wears love, loss, fear, and anger all at once without ever feeling false. It is a bold and commanding performance, often delivered with only a few words.

The English takes work, there’s no doubt about that. This is phone-down, no-talking programming. For some (unfortunately, I suspect, for many), that will prove too daunting a demand. But for those who are up to the challenge, the series’ payoffs will prove far more memorable than all of the effort it took to get there. A little inference and a dash of patience are necessary—this is a Western, after all.

This is Blick’s bleeding-hearted love letter to the genre, and by its end, The English join the ranks of the grandest entries ever made.

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The English Review: A Gorgeous And Gruesome Tale Of Vengeance In The Old West

There's almost always a market for gritty westerns, but there's been a bounty of well-made, pitch-black tales of the American west lately. Joining the ranks of shows like " 1883 " and films like the Academy Award-winning " Power of the Dog " is " The English ," a new Prime Video and BBC limited series from writer and director Hugo Blick about romance and revenge on the lawless prairie.

Emily Blunt stars as Lady Cornelia Locke, an Englishwoman of some means who arrives in Kansas looking for vengeance when the violent chaos of the plains throws a massive wrench in her plans. Her fate seems to be intertwined with a Pawnee ex-calvary scout named Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), who is on his own journey of bloody revenge and redemption. There's more going on — a whole lot more — but the primary drive of the story is Cornelia and Eli's fiery chemistry and their shared goals.

The dialogue is tightly written, the cinematography from director of photography Arnau Valls Colomer is absolutely gorgeous with plenty of stunning landscapes to gaze upon, and there's plenty of action and suspense, but the series rests firmly on Blunt's shoulders. Cornelia has to be more than an archetype in order to hold the series together, and Blunt's incredible performance helps do just that. The script is a bit too complex at times, but the many parts work so well together that "The English" ends up being a compelling and powerful watch.

Bound by fate

When we first meet Cornelia and Eli, she's a well-dressed woman in lace and layers of skirts and he's strung up with rope around his chest, dangling in the hot desert sun as his captors look on. There's an immediate sense of dread, and it never really lets up until the final credits roll. "The English" is not a happy story, and it's an impressively bleak tale of just how horrible living in the anarchy of the time was, and those first few minutes give the audience a pretty good idea as to what they're in for. This isn't "Tombstone" or a John Wayne movie ; this is something a little more gruesome.

Cornelia attempts to save Eli by buying his freedom, but ends up captured by a real jerk (played by Ciarán Hinds) herself instead because she's both beautiful and wealthy. Eli ends up sent on his merry way and comes back to save her, repaying her kindness for trying to save him in the first place, though he says he came back just to get revenge on Hinds' character. Eli thinks Cornelia is too soft, but then she drowns her captor in a pretty elaborate way and he realizes she might have what it takes to survive the west. The two get to know one another and realize they have similar goals and destinations: she's looking for the man who killed her son, while he's looking to reclaim ancestral land. They set out, and the rest of the series follows them on a winding journey that leaves a trail of bodies in their wake.

Elegantly depicted misery

Each episode ends up being a different kind of awfulness that Cornelia and Eli must contend with, and initially, it feels a bit grueling. There are numerous scruffy, dirty men who have their own side stories, and while some of them end up being important by the end, they can occasionally feel a little confusing. Thankfully, the dialogue is so well-written and so well-delivered that it's a joy to listen to, and the visuals are lovely to look at. There are loads of wind-swept plains and wooden buildings lit by the setting sun, contrasting the desolate beauty of the prairie with the desperate violence of the people within it.

What "The English" does better than anything else is impress upon the viewer just how miserable it was to live in the 1800s in the American west. The title refers to the way many British people romanticized the west, both then and now. That idealized version is dashed, of course, and the reality is much, much more brutal. I cannot stress enough just how hard this series is willing to go; it reminds me most of the brilliant Australian film "The Proposition," and features an incredible amount of intense violence and horror. There's murder, rape, torture, and mutilation, and some of the imagery is truly shocking. If you're not prepared to see a wall full of human scalps, this might not be the show for you.

Star-crossed lovers

"The English" has a wonderful supporting cast, including performances by Tom Hughes, Stephen Rea, Ben Temple, and more. The standouts are Gary Farmer (Uncle Brownie from "Reservation Dogs") and Kimberly Guerrero (Auntie B on "Reservation Dogs"), who play a couple of grifters "taking back what's theirs" from the various travelers who wander through their land. Every single actor is giving it their all, but ultimately the most important performances are from Blunt and Spencer. Luckily for "The English," they're both absolutely brilliant, and they have wonderful onscreen chemistry.

I don't really care for fictional romances. I'm a cynical weirdo who finds the vast majority of romance stories trite or annoying, but the fledgling romance at the center of "The English" is truly romantic. The two have conversations that could easily become corny but don't through the power of the performances and script, and their frequent references to the stars become a through-line of their relationship throughout the six episodes. She tells him about her star sign (she's a Scorpio!) and he tells her about Pawnee legends regarding the stars, sharing their individual cultures but creating a shared narrative. Blunt, who many know best for playing Mary Poppins, is at her fiery best here, making even her "A Quiet Place" performance look tame. Cornelia is a flawed female hero who's equal parts beautiful and badass, but never ever feels like someone's historical fantasy dream girl.

"The English" occasionally flounders in its complex narrative, but its performances, dialogue, and cinematography make it a must-see for anyone who likes their westerns a bit more bleak and bloody.

"The English" is now on Prime Video.

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'The English' on Prime Video: The Ending Explained and Your Questions Answered

The Prime Video Western is a triumph, but a few parts of its narrative aren't explained in detail. Let's discuss in full-on spoiler territory.

Best New Journalist 2019 Australian IT Journalism Awards

Close up of Emily Blunt as Cornelia Locke, wearing a pink dress out in the desert

Emily Blunt plays Lady Cornelia Locke.

Just finished The English on Prime Video ? Amazon's Western brought home its moving story of Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), a mother running the gauntlet to enact revenge on the man who caused her son's death. It also turned out to be a great love story with ex-Pawnee Scout Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), set in the most highly saturated desert landscape imaginable.

Amid the sweeping romantic music and gorgeous cinematography, some of the harder details about what rival businessmen David Melmont (Rafe Spall) and Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes) were up to might have been lost across the show's two timelines. Let's clear up our understanding of everything that happened in the stunning action-packed, tension-laden limited series.

Spoilers ahead and a content warning: sexual violence, suicide

Who killed Lady Cornelia Locke's son?

It's clear from the outset that Cornelia, a fancily dressed Englishwoman with bags of money, has traveled to Kansas in 1890 on a revenge mission over her son's killer. We don't discover the actual identity of the man until midway through the series, when we meet the gnarly, immoral and lower class David Melmont, a business companion of Thomas Trafford, Cornelia's lover in England who had proposed to marry her.

What were Melmont and Trafford doing in Wyoming?

In 1875, 15 years before Cornelia arrives in Kansas, Trafford and his men land in Chalk River, Wyoming, with hopes of starting a cattle rearing business. In the Wild West, where just about anything goes, the party begins to turn against itself as Melmont acts out against his class superior. Melmont finds himself more at home among a cruel, independent splinter group of the American army: Corporal Jerome McClintock and cousins Billy Myers and Timothy Flynn. The group is going rogue in its search for Running Hawk, a prominent fighter from the Cheyenne Native American tribe, who had killed and mutilated Myers' brother Lonnie for trespassing on their lands.

What happened at the Massacre at Chalk River?

Against Trafford's wishes, Melmont informs the army of the whereabouts of the Cheyenne settlement and joins them in slaughtering all the men, women and children in what becomes known as the Massacre at Chalk River. Days later, the four men are arrested over engaging prostitutes at a brothel, a serious crime at the time. Yet Melmont and McClintock escape and travel to England. There, Melmont attempts to scam Cornelia into giving him money by claiming it was Trafford who had committed the heinous crimes and a huge bounty had been issued in exchange for his life.

Rafe Spall as David Melmont, holding a gun out in the Wild West

David Melmont (Rafe Spall) commits many atrocities.

How did Melmont kill Cornelia's son?

Cornelia's doubts about Melmont's claims are confirmed in a letter from Trafford that reveals it was Melmont who was behind the abhorrent acts in America. When Melmont visits Cornelia's house again, she confronts him with the truth. Undeterred, Melmont rapes Cornelia and steals her money before returning to America with McClintock.

Cornelia's horror is compounded by several components: Trafford's letter also informs her that he's decided to stay in America, bringing their relationship to an end. At the brothel in America, Melmont and the army group contracted syphilis from a worker named Stella Shriver, who later became part of a "human freaks and oddities" business after the infection ravaged her appearance.

Melmont's act of sexual violence not only infects Cornelia with syphilis, but leaves her pregnant. Tragically, the sexually transmitted infection passes onto their son. In the picture Cornelia keeps of him in the locket around her neck, we see the boy's appearance shows signs of "erosion of the soft tissues and bone, particularly of the face," Cornelia says in episode 6. The other phase 4 effects of syphilis she describes are "blindness, deafness, heart defects, stroke, mental insanity, finally death." Cornelia raised her boy with unconditional love until he died at 14.

The events in Chalk River led to Melmont infecting his biological son with deadly syphilis. In a nutshell, Melmont's cold-blooded actions resulted in Cornelia's son's death. After many years, this led to Cornelia's rage-filled mission to confront Melmont with his crimes against her and her boy.

Tom Hughes as Thomas Trafford riding a horse out in the Wild West

Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes) travels to America to start a cattle rearing business.

What happened to Thomas Trafford?

In the past timeline, we see the difficulties Cornelia's lover goes through to set up a cattle breeding farm over the 15 years he spends in Wyoming. Companion Melmont abandoned Trafford and ended up striking gold in Colorado, using his business savvy to create a successful trading business. He built a new town called Hoxom on the very same land the Massacre at Chalk River took place. His success not enough, Melmont still sought to bring Trafford to failure and arranged the slaughters of his cows and calves.

After the massacre, army men Billy Myers and Timothy Flynn asked Trafford if they could join his cattle breeding outfit. Despising them and their crimes, Trafford refused and marked the men with his branding iron. Melmont later bought Myers and Flynn plots of land, and the pair formed a rival cattle rearing business to Trafford.

When Trafford tries to enlist the assistance of local Sheriff Robert Marshall in protecting his cattle from Melmont, Marshall becomes distracted by the deaths of Myers, Flynn and Flynn's wife. Like Melmont, Myers and Flynn also contracted syphilis. Fearing the effects of the infection, Myers hanged himself. Flynn shot his wife, who also exhibited marks of the infection, before turning the gun on himself.

Despite successfully opening a cattle rearing business in Caine County, near Chalk River, Trafford believes the land to bring bad luck. In episode 6, during the 1890 timeline, Trafford's manager, Clay Jackson, reports to Cornelia, Eli and the sheriff that Trafford drowned in a flash flood. The party attempted to save Trafford by throwing him a rope, but presumably realizing his herd and life's work was about to be destroyed, Trafford cut himself free and allowed himself to drown. Jackson says that this is what Trafford wants, to become a part of the place he opened.

Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer as Cornelia and Eli hugging out in the Wild West

In a bittersweet ending, Eli and Cornelia must part ways.

Why can't Eli and Cornelia be together?

Despite forming a close bond and sharing a kiss, Cornelia's infection prevents her from becoming too close to Eli. Eli must also go into hiding after fully taking the blame for Melmont's death, protecting Cornelia and Martha Myers. The sheriff releases Eli, who will surely be killed by the Hoxom townspeople if he becomes known as Melmont's murderer, on the condition he leaves and never returns. In departing, Eli might one day return home to Nebraska, where he was born, and reclaim "just a few acres" of land the government took from his Pawnee tribe. Thanks to the "Homestead Act," there's a chance the government will give Eli the land for his services to the army. Before he rides off, Cornelia gives Eli a phial of "the best" wheat seed, which he can potentially grow on his reclaimed land once he's safely out of hiding. Cornelia, meanwhile, must return to England and see out her next journey.

What happens to Cornelia and the boy White Moon?

Cornelia inadvertently ends up saving a young boy named White Moon from bandit Black-Eyed Mog's camp. Eli recognizes the boy as the son of Running Hawk; in the opening scene of the show, on his last day in the American army, Eli witnessed soldiers kill Running Hawk, but didn't stop them. He did however play some part in preventing the army from shooting Running Hawk's wife and son, although the pair still feel betrayed by Eli, even though they originate from different tribes. When Eli takes Cornelia to a doctor, Cornelia convinces the doctor to take care of White Moon, handing over the last of her money. He accepts her money as backing into a new venture, "Flathead Jackson's Wild West Show: True Tales of America! Beyond the realistic."

In 1903, 13 years after her journey in America and Melmont's death, Cornelia is exhibiting the phase 4 effects of syphilis on her face, a "shame" she hides beneath a black veil. Before her imminent death, she visits the doctor's Wild West show when it travels to Berkshire, England. She meets with an older White Moon, who remembers her and knows that her "shame" isn't hers, but Melmont's. White Moon appreciates seeing the world and making a living in the "circus" by telling more authentic stories of Native Americans. He keeps the memories of Cornelia's beloved Eli alive by playing Major North and First Sergeant Eli Whipp who saved a "white woman."

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The English Review: Saddle Up and Enjoy This Compelling Chase Western

Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer, and a stellar cast fuel creator Hugo Blick's passionate tale about survival, identity, and redemption.

Two beleaguered souls meet as if by chance while braving the western frontier. “Can you shoot?” asks a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer). Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt)—aristocratic, English, fish out of water, disheveled—replies: “If I have to.”

Eli doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh, you’ll have to.”

Welcome to 1890 middle America, a violent landscape inspired by big dreams and filled with plenty of bloodshed. It’s the captivating setting of The English , the new Amazon Studios epic chase Western from award-winning writer and director Hugo Blick ( The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising, The Shadow Line ). The six-episode limited series, which hits Amazon Prime on November 11, also happens to be one of the most captivating Westerns to hit the small screen in some time—that’s code for “temporarily pause what you’re currently streaming, folks, and dive into this exceptional experience.”

The English follows Cornelia’s entry into the daunting and dangerous new landscape of the West. She’s determined to get revenge on an unruly gent she blames for the death of her son. Fate bumps her into Eli, a member of the Pawnee Nation by birth and a guy with his own dilemmas. It takes a lot to survive the treacherous souls occupying the West, after all. This series spares no details in showing how gruesome the late-1800s were, in fact. Suddenly joined together, Cornelia and Eli discover a shared history that they must defeat if either of them is to survive.

The stellar cast includes Rafe Spall ( The Salisbury Poisonings, Trying ) and Nichola McAuliffe ( Tomorrow Never Dies, Doctor Who ) in standout roles. Tom Hughes ( A Discovery of Witches, Victoria ), Stephen Rea ( The Shadow Line, The Honourable Woman ), Valerie Pachner ( A Hidden Life, The Kingsman ), Toby Jones ( Marvellous, Detectorists ), Ciaran Hinds ( The Terror, The Woman in Black ), Malcolm Storry ( The Princess Bride, Doc Martin ), Steve Wall ( Raised by Wolves, The Witcher ), Sule Rimi ( Black Earth Rising, Strike Back ), and Cristian Solimeno ( Avenue 5, Guilt ) are also on board.

When the series was being prepped for production, Blick noted: "The chance to make a Western with Emily Blunt and the cast is so delicious I’m still wondering if it’s one of those weird dreams we were all having during lockdown. If not, a thrilling, romantic, epic horse-opera is heading to your screen… and I couldn’t be more excited.”

Related: The Fabelmans Review: Steven Spielberg's Heartfelt Memoir of Family & Filmmaking

The Acting in The English

Blick has a good reason to be jazzed about Blunt ( A Quiet Place, Jungle Cruise, Mary Poppins Returns .) Always a joy to watch, the actress delivers a powerhouse performance as Cornelia, balancing the character’s vulnerability with her fierce determination to right a horrible wrong, even though she’s not fully equipped—at least in the beginning—to do so. An Emmy nod is in order for Blunt next year. The same can be said for Spencer ( Blindspot , Barkskins ), a rare on-screen presence—deep, grounded, often hypnotic. You don’t experience many actors like Spencer and together, he and Blunt give viewers two memorable characters worthy of our investment. What on-screen magic they create.

Cornelia arrives at a Kansas outpost circa 1890 carrying far too much—literally and figuratively. She’s got trunks galore and frothy gowns, and perhaps way too much cash for an English lady to be toting around out on the frontier. But avenge her son’s death she must. So onward she goes even though a gaggle of bad fellas have anticipated her arrival.

Eli, Pawnee-born and now a defunct U.S. Army calvary, is a lone wolf. Natives raise their eyebrows over his Calvary involvement. White folks discriminate based on his skin color. Eli’s wish? To grab a couple of acres somewhere safe.

But Cornelia and Eli’s futures are connected. And so are their pasts. “You and I have met,” Cornelia tells Eli. “It was in the stars.”

The first three episodes of The English do well in creating the vast landscape and wicked danger of the Western world. The cinematography here is wonderful eye-candy—the series was shot overseas so Spain fills in for the Wild West.

Mostly, viewers will be intrigued by some of the characters in this Western territory. Anybody that knows much about the period realizes that getting hanged or shot over a simple misunderstanding isn’t that far-fetched. More gruesome, perhaps, is the havoc white men inflicted, particularly on entire Native communities. Spall’s David Melmont comes to mind. His character is, literally, the heart of darkness. Still, it gives Spall plenty of scene-stealing opportunities and his bone-chilling performance in The English is one for the books.

McAuliffe’s Black Eyed Mog, a hardened frontier woman, appears less frequently, but she’s bound to give you the spooks. Collectively, Blick and the creative team have introduced a fascinating array of characters and the actors embodying them are pitch-perfect. But what about the actual story of The English ? Does it get the job done?

Related: Exclusive: Charlotte Nicdao, Jessie Ennis, and Ashley Burch on Season Three of Mythic Quest

Is The English Worth the Investment?

The short answer is: Yes. Episode 4 takes place 15 years before the events we’re initially introduced to in Episode 1, and it does a fine job of connecting the creative dots. This backstory helps us understand what’s really at stake for Cornelia. And Eli, for that matter. It also introduces an evil force that will be hard to reckon with.

Artistically and thematically, I couldn’t get enough of The English. I wanted more. In that respect, Blick did his job. Core themes of identity and revenge interweave themselves in a fascinating parable that also touches on race, power, and love. The middle episodes tend to droop just a bit. Like bullets ricocheting off wooden porches or barns, you wonder where things may land and there’s a fear—because the front half was so good—that the story may have lost its footing. Like roping cattle, though, Blick steers things back in the right direction. This comes to light during an investigation by the local sheriff Robert Marshall (played by Rea) and the young widow, Martha Myers (Valerie Pachner) into a series of bizarre and macabre unsolved murders. Here we realize the full extent of Cornelia and Eli's intertwined history. The passion found in the latter half of Episodes 5 and 6 are, by far, something of the best things we’ve experienced in a Western.

Much is at stake as Cornelia and Eli’s precarious, often violent, journey unravels, and in the hands of another writer, producer, and director—Blick is all three—I sense we’d experience a much choppier ride overall. There’s depth and tenderness, too, when we learn more about Cornelia’s emotional plight. Her bond with Eli is visceral as past traumas come to light. These truly are expectational characters.

The English is one of the most passionate Western tales to hit the screen. Blunt and Spencer are cinematic gold. The cast shines. The acting is powerful, effective, and, to a degree, a bit soul-stirring. Aside from its midway dip—easily forgivable—Blick’s big dive into Westerns is one hell of a—to coin his term—"horse opera."

The English hits Amazon Prime Video on November 11.

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The English

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Watch The English with a subscription on Prime Video.

Cast & Crew

Emily Blunt

Cornelia Locke

Chaske Spencer

Stephen Rea

Sheriff Robert Marshall

Ciarán Hinds

Richard M Watts

David Melmont

Thomas Trafford

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‘The English’: Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer Saddle Up

A new Amazon series puts an unlikely alliance at the heart of an unconventional tribute to the classic American western.

Share full article

Emily Blunt sits wearing a bright red outfit and looks into the camera. Behind her stands Chaske Spencer, wearing a denim shirt and gazing off to the side.

By Elisabeth Vincentelli

The new Amazon series “The English” bears all the external signs of the classic westerns of yore , with scenes that could have been pulled straight from a 1950s Technicolor epic. There are horseback riders silhouetted against retina-singeing vistas, desolate outposts appearing like sunbaked hallucinations, and low-angle shots that magnify people into mythic figures.

“I was enthralled, just blown away by the beauty of it,” the show’s leading man, Chaske Spencer, said of discovering “The English” on a big screen at its recent London premiere. “It took me back to, like, ‘Giant’ and some of those big John Ford western movies.”

But “The English,” which was written and directed by Hugo Blick and premieres Friday on Prime Video, is also a very different beast. While the story is, in some ways, a relatively conventional chase, with some characters you root for and others you want to see dead — and many more somewhere in the uncomfortable middle — it is suffused by an unconventional spirit with an uncommon romance at its center. All of that appealed greatly to its marquee star, Emily Blunt.

“Hugo certainly writes with great panache — you’ve got to kind of allow for it and allow space for it,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “He makes me laugh because he seems a bit baffled by the fact that people think his writing can be a bit bonkers.”

This may be an understatement. “The English” is very arch and very stylized, at once real and surreal. “It has a classicism,” Blick said in a video chat. “But I hope in front of the camera there’s a modernity to it.”

At the heart of the story are two people estranged from society, each with a mission. Blunt plays Cornelia Locke, an English lady who finds herself tearing through the wild expanses of the American West in 1890, driven by revenge; Spencer plays Eli Whipp, a Pawnee former Army scout with whom Cornelia forms an unlikely — and yet completely inevitable — alliance .

In a genre where female leads are rarely granted full agency, the strong-willed Cornelia stands out. “Someone said to me the other day, ‘How great that she’s not the jolly whore in a western,’” Blunt, 39, said on the phone, laughing. “The jolly whore or a damsel tied to a tree.”

Blick, a British television creator who had written enticingly complex characters for Maggie Gyllenhaal in “The Honorable Woman” and Michaela Coel in “Black Earth Rising,” had some very specific ideas about whom he wanted to play Cornelia.

“I always had Emily in mind, so I just sort of went, ‘I’ll send it to Mary Poppins,’” he said, referring to Blunt’s starring role in the 2018 film “Mary Poppins Returns.” “And I did mostly, I have to say, because she was so brilliant in ‘Sicario.’ ”

In turn, Blunt said she was hooked as soon as she started reading the script and encountered Cornelia.

“It was that first line where she said something like, ‘That’s why we met: It was in the stars and we believed in the stars, you and I,’” she recalled. “Then she says this Pawnee word, ‘tataciksta,’ which means “I cherish you,’ and I was like … ” She let out a groan of pleasure, then laughed. So taken was she that she ended up signing on as an executive producer as well, and was very hands-on throughout the project.

Just as crucial to the show’s beating heart was figuring out who would play Eli. Spencer soon seemed just as obvious a choice as Blunt had been.

“When Chaske came and read for the part, the air changed in the room,” Blunt said. “He walked out and I went, ‘What just happened?’ He really understood the heart of this character and the stillness of him and that kind of regality he has.”

Despite his love for the classic westerns to which “The English” pays affectionate tribute, Spencer acknowledged a common flaw: They often relied upon white actors in brownface to play Indigenous roles or used white characters who had “gone Native” as a way into Indigenous culture. (Spencer, Blunt and Blick each mentioned the 1967 Martin Ritt western “Hombre,” which starred Paul Newman as a white man raised by Native Americans.)

It took a long time for the industry to change, which Spencer, who is of Indigenous descent, recognizes too well. Known for playing the Quileute werewolf Sam Uley in the “Twilight” movies, he has, at 47, been around long enough to see the changes firsthand.

“There was a time when I wasn’t allowed to play the lead actor who was Native,” Spencer said in a video chat.

“I made some friends who aren’t Native but played Native, and it’s not their fault — they were just doing a job,” he added. But when the time came for him to take the lead, “I was very prepared,” he said. “You’re sitting on the sidelines waiting to play in the game; you’re ready to go.”

His character avoids conventions of the so-called noble savage; Eli’s internal conflict pits his loyalty to his heritage against his history in the U.S. Army, which spent decades at war with Indigenous Americans. Still, Eli is a man of few words, which was itself a potential minefield: Would he be yet another cliché of the stoic Native American?

“I was a little afraid of that, but it’s just written so well,” Spencer said, adding: “When Eli showed restraint, that was really important to me because I didn’t want the audience to have a clear view of him. I wanted to play the character with his cards very close to the chest.”

There is also a tenderness to Eli, which prevents his being reduced to some mysterious object of desire. He and Cornelia develop trust and respect as fully developed human beings, which the actors built by spending time together before filming started. Their affection for each other was evident.

“Emily and I rehearsed, preproduction, and we hung out,” Spencer said. “We talked about our families, things we could relate to and we could bring into the characters. I love rehearsal, and a lot of times on film, you don’t get that.”

Blick also thoroughly researched the place and time, especially when it came to Eli’s background. Once the script was completed, he sent it to members of the Pawnee and Cheyenne Nations so they could vet it.

“When the Pawnee Nation gave us the stamp of approval, I felt very honored by that,” Spencer said. “We had people come in to help me teach the song and the language, and developing those skills helped me get into character even more.”

And yet “The English” feels more like a fever dream than a documentary. The big landscapes of the Spanish desert, where the show was shot (just like Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns), are matched by big emotions. The soaring soundtrack by Federico Jusid accompanies human dramas that escalate into the realm of tragedy.

And as a quest for revenge feeds much of the action, so does the kind of smoldering attraction great romances are made of — something Spencer relished.

“You don’t get to see the Native scout having some type of romantic relationship with the leading lady,” he said of the vast majority of westerns. “When I read the script, I loved the romance, I loved the chemistry. I loved the adventure. I loved the history of it, too.”

And then there is the violence, which is just as intense as the romance, and a lot more graphic. But Blick was especially careful not to revisit past traumas by re-enacting them.

“There was one type of violence that was witty, humorous, and you kind of get to see it because you’re in the world that comes with it,” he said. “There were other forms of violence, usually applied to Native Americans by expansionism, that I absolutely didn’t want us to look at. There are certain kinds of elements that even this kind of story is not going to participate in, and only allude to.”

Still, viewers should brace themselves. Watching the first two episodes on a big screen at the London premiere, Blunt experienced the series’s impact full force. “I almost vomited in my mouth,” she said, referring to a specific scene. “It was just so awful.”

That is just one of the ways in which “The English” commits to the intensity of the emotions it encompasses.

“It can dance between being witty and violent and beautiful and funny,” Blunt said. “It can be all of those things. And people are all those things as well.”

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The English’ On Prime Video, Where Emily Blunt Plays A Woman In The Wild West Looking For Revenge

Where to stream:.

The English
Emily Blunt

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Has a Western ever been told from the perspective of someone visiting it from aristocratic Europe? Probably, but not often enough to remember. Which is why the conceit behind The English , created by Hugo Blick, is so intriguing. It helps that the star is the ever-appealing Emily Blunt.

THE ENGLISH : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As a woman looks at the sunrise, she says in voice over, “Without you, I’d have been killed right from the start. That’s how we met. That’s why we met.”

The Gist: After scenes that show pictures of an aristocratic Englishwoman posing with a Pawnee native, among other views, we flash back to 1890, “Thirteen Years Before.”

As we see some soldiers shot a Pawnee native as a way to get revenge for one of their own being killed years earlier, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a cavalry scout who happens to be Pawnee, comes on the scene and cools down tensions. While the natives there think he’s a traitor for being in the army, it seems that the other soldiers revere him. He tells one of them that, now that he’s retiring from the army, he’s going to use the Homestead Act to find himself a plot of land.

A few days later, Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), a British aristocrat, stops at a ramshackle hotel in the middle of nowhere on the Western frontier. The proprietor, Richard M. Watts (Ciarán Hinds), greets her and explains to her that the native that’s been roped up near the livestock got there because he politely came into the hotel for a drink. Eli is that native, and it doesn’t matter if he was a soldier or not; without his uniform on, he’s now one of “them”.

She offers Watts money to cut Eli down, clean him up and send him on his way. He does send him out with stagecoach driver Sebold Cusk (Toby Jones), and Eli’s abilities come in handy when the coach is intercepted by three men intent on robbing it, but Cusk ends up getting shot, leading Eli to take the horses and ride them back to the hotel in order to get some payback.

Cornelia is in this backwater because she wants to track down and kill the man who she feels is responsible for the death of her son. She finds out pretty quickly that Watts has been contracted by that man to kill her. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Watts isn’t going to draw things out and enjoy himself first. Eli intervenes, though, and gets that payback he wanted, and also gets the bag with the medicine he needs for him and his family.

That night, after dispatching Watts’ henchmen, Cornelia literally begs Eli to help her get to the county where she can get revenge on the man she’s looking for. He finally agrees, but promises her that the journey is going to be a bloody one, and she needs to be ready for it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The English reminds us of the Yellowstone prequel 1883 , as well as Walker: Independence , just told from a different perspective.

Our Take: The perspective we talk about above is twofold. The main perspective is Cornelia’s; coming from aristocratic England to the American West in those frontier days must be a shock to the system for her. And Hugo Blick, who wrote and directed The English , certainly has a British point of view himself. The way he is looking at that era is from the perspective of someone who can’t believe the lawlessness that pervades the region, and the idea that you’ll have to kill people in order to survive.

It’s definitely an interesting viewpoint, albeit one that plays out very slowly in the first episode. There’s a reason why Cornelia, who believes that the fact that she and Eli met and survived the dire situation they were in was magic or at the very least fate, wants him as her guide. He’s seen things, as he explains: “I’ve seen villages razed and razed them myself: Men, women and children, shot, stick, cut, hung. I’ve seen Hell and I’ve made Hell.” He knows that there will be a reckoning for it, but the willingness to be both hero and villain is the only way he was able to survive.

That’s the other perspective at play in The English , and perhaps the one that’s more fascinating. Eli is a native who joined the army, the very entity that has been killing and displacing his tribe and others over most of his life. He says a Baptist gave him the white name “Eli Whipp” because he was good with a rope. He’s seen what white settlers have done to decimate tribes all over the west. But he also has the rare loyalty of his fellow soldiers. It’s a viewpoint that’s quite unique, and one we hope Blick explores more in depth as the season goes on.

As we mentioned, Blick’s direction definitely lets dialogue and scenery breathe; there are long pauses between statements, and he even languishes on the act of Watts eating and serving Cornelia “prairie oysters”, which are most assuredly testicles. It allows the viewer to get great looks at the dusty landscape of the American West, but we do hope the story moves along at a bit of a faster pace as the season progresses.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: We see the silhouettes of Eli and Cornelia on their horses as they set out north at sunrise.

Sleeper Star: Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones make a big impact in the first episode, even though they’re just guest stars. They show what both Cornelia and Eli are up against as they make their journey.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the bandits show up at the stagecoach, Sebold gives Eli his shotgun. When Eli asks him how many rounds it has, Sebold replies, “Ten, I spent two on a jack rabbit.” “Then you missed,” Eli replied.

Will you stream or skip the unique western #TheEnglish on @PrimeVideo ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) November 13, 2022

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the languid pace of the first episode, the unique perspectives at play in The English make it different enough from your standard Western to make it interesting.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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Emily Blunt Goes Wild in ‘The English’

BBC and Amazon’s six-part series puts an English rose to the test in America’s Wild West

The English is about the English, but it’s also about the Russians. And Europeans. Anyone, in short, who has settled in America’s West, where BBC and Amazon’s sweeping six-part series is set. We learn all this in the opening voiceover from the first episode, and it’s a helpful signpost for how this show proceeds: one where you’re immersed in an unfamiliar habitat, and forced to pick up, and adjust to, local customs immediately. The English also refers to an Englishwoman, singular: Cornelia Locke, who has arrived in 1890s Wyoming with a bag full of cash and a thirst for revenge.

Emily Blunt plays Locke, an aristocrat whose soldier father was gifted “half of Devon”, who’s hoping to track down the man she believes is responsible for the death of her son. How, why and even where her son died is unclear. A Pawnee scout named Eli Whipp, played by Chaske Spencer, best known for his role in The Twilight Saga franchise (perhaps The English will edge that qualification out), crosses path with her and – inevitably, adorably, sometimes-bloodily – they become friends. Whipp is also on his own mission to reclaim land; a mission complicated by his contentious relationships with almost everyone he meets. Whipp soon teaches Locke how to handle a gun and her enemies, two skills the Englishwoman picks up fairly quickly.

It’s not always an easy show to watch. Heads are blown off, hearts are shot through with arrows. Locke first sees Whipp hanging outside a hotel, alive through the might of his tip toes. Directed and written by British filmmaker Hugo Blick, who created 2018’s Black Earth Rising starring Michaela Coel, he lingers on the mechanics of these confrontations, giving the scenes a dry, almost unbearable tension, appropriate for the scorched surroundings. The vast, quite beautiful landscape – the show was filmed in Spain – provides some respite, though you know danger is always around the corner.

Dialogue, sometimes pleasingly, sometimes eyeroll-inducingly, evokes phrases you might find on a fridge magnet: “The difference between what you need and what you want is what you can put on a horse,” intones Whipp. Thank God for Blunt, who punctures the gnomic atmosphere with some much-needed scepticism and just-there sarcasm. Whenever the stares become a little too long, the silences a little too heavy, Blunt wields her trademark tone – the kind you will recognise from talk show appearances and her turn as sardonic fashion assistant Emily in The Devil Wears Prada – and the show snaps to attention. It can be disconcerting, Blunt’s mannerisms sometimes seem too modern for this particular period, but once you embrace the rhythm, you’re away, off into the deep orange sunset.

It wouldn’t work without Spencer and Blunt's chemistry; their conversation is frequently heavy (they really like talking about death!) but also surprisingly playful (a back-and-forth about star signs recalls two millennials on a first date). A starry cast populates this landscape. Ciarán Hinds provides our first bitter taste of the West’s prejudices – a racist, misogynistic, dangerous man. Hinds makes for a convincing villain, even if his arc is a little underdeveloped. Tom Hughes brings a sinister volatility to proceedings.

Blunt has, over the last couple of decades, emerged as one of our best all-rounders, cutting her teeth on rom-coms, period dramas and more recently, on action films ( Sicario , The Edge of Tomorrow ) and horror-thrillers like The Quiet Place , which was popular enough to prompt a sequel. But as accomplished as she is, none of those latter roles really combined action chops with her wry sense of humour. Perhaps, in this entertaining, thoughtful Western, she has finally found that role.

‘The English’ airs on BBC Two in the UK (all episodes are available to watch on iPlayer) and on Amazon Prime Video in the US

Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.

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‘The English’ Loses a Compelling Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer Two-Hander in Convoluted Web of Grievances: TV Review

Amazon Prime Video's new Western drama has plenty going for it, but ultimately loses its most interesting plot in too many others.

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From her first blazing scene to her melancholy last, Blunt brings her singular combination of warmth, wry humor, and flinty determination to the role of Cornelia, an English noblewoman hellbent on seeking revenge for her dead son. As conflicted Native American Eli, Spencer ably balances her out with a monotone stoicism that belies the roiling emotions motivating him to succeed in his rapidly changing homeland, on his own terms or not at all. Every time the two of them are onscreen, I could happily sit back and let their chemistry and stories take the wheel. Every time they aren’t, though, the series inevitably loses narrative steam as it works overtime to justify the detours.

And so for as much promise as “The English” has, and the consistently beautiful — if strangely pristine, given the brutality constantly at hand — Western landscapes bookending every scene, “frustrating” ends up the word most fitting to describe the series at large. Typically, I’m not one to recommend that a show drag its narratives out any more than necessary, but in this case, the overlapping stories end up too ambitious for the time Blick has to tell them. Sometimes, all you really need to tell a good story are the basics. With only six episodes to unpack everything, “The English” would have been better off significantly narrowing its focus to its greatest strengths: Blunt, Spencer and the unusual ties binding their characters’ quests for justice together.

“The English” premieres Friday, Nov. 11 on Amazon Prime Video.

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Movie Reviews

'la chimera' is marvelous — right up to its most magical ending.

Justin Chang

Carol Duarte and Josh O'Connor in La Chimera . Neon hide caption

Carol Duarte and Josh O'Connor in La Chimera .

The wonderful 42-year-old filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher practices a kind of cinema that I've come to think of as "Italian magical neorealism." She gives us portraits of hard-scrabble lives in poor rural communities, but they're graced by a whimsical, almost fable-like sense of enchantment.

Rohrwacher's 2014 film, The Wonders , was a lyrical drama about a family of Tuscan beekeepers. She followed that in 2018 with Happy as Lazzaro , about a group of sharecroppers on a tobacco farm whose story moves from picaresque comedy to aching tragedy.

'The Wonders' Of Family And Change

Her marvelous new movie, La Chimera , follows in much the same vein, with one key difference. While Rohrwacher has generally worked with non-professional Italian actors, this time she's cast the English actor Josh O'Connor , best known for his Emmy-winning performance as a young Prince Charles on The Crown .

But O'Connor's character here doesn't give off even a whiff of royalty, even if his name is Arthur. When we first meet him, he's asleep on a train bound for his old stomping grounds in Tuscany. He's just been released from prison after serving some time for the crime of grave robbing.

Arthur has a mysterious archeological talent: Wielding a divining rod, he can detect the presence of buried artifacts, many of which date back to the Etruscan civilization more than 2,000 years ago. Arthur works with a group of tombaroli , or tomb raiders, who rely on him to figure out where to dig.

Upon his return, many of those old friends welcome him back with a parade — one of several moments in which Rohrwacher briefly channels the vibrant human chaos of a Fellini film. Arthur is a little reluctant to rejoin his old gang, since they let him take the rap after their last job. But he doesn't seem to have anything else to do, or anywhere else to go. He may be an outsider — his Italian throughout is decent but far from perfect — but it's the only place in the world that feels remotely like home. And O'Connor plays him with such a deep sense of melancholy that it feels almost special when his handsome, careworn face breaks into a warm smile.

It's not immediately clear what Arthur wants; unlike his cohorts, he doesn't seem all that interested in making money off their spoils. The answer turns out to lie in his dreams, which are haunted by a beautiful young woman named Beniamina — the love of his life, whom he's lost under unclear circumstances.

And so Arthur's determination to go underground becomes a metaphor for his longing for an irretrievable past: Beniamina is the Eurydice to his Orpheus, and he wants her back desperately.

Arthur is still close to Beniamina's mother, Flora, played with a wondrous mix of warmth and imperiousness by the great Isabella Rossellini. Her presence here made me think of her filmmaker father, the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini — a fitting association for a movie about how the past is forever seeping into the present.

One of the pleasures of Rohrwacher's filmmaking is the way she subtly blurs our sense of time. La Chimera is set in the 1980s, but it could be taking place 20 years earlier, or 20 years later. Rohrwacher and her brilliant cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, shot the movie on a mix of film stocks and sometimes tweak the image in ways that evoke the cinematic antiquities of the silent era. As sorrowful as Arthur's journey is, there's a playfulness to Rohrwacher's sensibility that keeps pulling you in, inviting you to get lost in the movie's mysteries.

One of the story's most significant characters is Italia, played by the Brazilian actor Carol Duarte, who works in Flora's household. Italia is a bit of an odd duck with a beguiling bluntness about her, and she might be just the one to pull Arthur out of his slump and get him to stop living in the past.

I won't give away what happens, except to say that La Chimera builds to not one but two thrilling scenes of underground exploration, in which Arthur must finally figure out his life's purpose — not by using a divining rod, but by following his heart. And it leads to the most magical movie ending I've seen in some time, and also the most real.

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Godzilla x kong: the new empire, common sense media reviewers.

Giant monster battles fun, humans meh in mega fight-fest.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Movie Poster: King Kong and Godzilla look ready for action, helicopters in foreground

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Amid the somewhat convoluted story is a theme of t

While the humans must chip in and offer their pers

The human characters are diverse on the surface le

Danger/peril and giant monster fights, with slammi

Infrequent uses of "s--t," "ass," "hell," "damn,"

Partially obscured bags of Cheetos shown.

Positive Messages

Amid the somewhat convoluted story is a theme of teamwork, as the monsters must learn to trust one another and work together to defeat a greater evil. The story also shows the importance of stepping up and offering your personal skills and services when needed.

Positive Role Models

While the humans must chip in and offer their personal skills and services they're needed, characters are pretty shallow and tend to contradict themselves. For example, Dr. Andrews at first wonders about the possibilities of the new subterranean world but at other times believes things are "impossible." And Bernie flips back and forth between being curious and excited about scientific possibility and behaving like a third-rate comical coward.

Diverse Representations

The human characters are diverse on the surface level, though none are particularly well developed. The main human character is a female doctor (Rebecca Hall). Co-star Kaylee Hottle comes from an all-deaf family, and her character, Jia, communicates with her adoptive mother via American Sign Language (ASL). Podcaster Bernie Hayes is played by Black actor Brian Tyree Henry, and Chinese-born Fala Chen plays the Iwi Queen. Rachel House, who comes from the Māori people of New Zealand, plays an important member of Dr. Andrews' team, Asian-Australian actor Ron Smyck plays a member of the Hollow Earth outpost, and Black actor Kevin Copeland plays a submarine commander. Many more characters of color and women in smaller/background roles.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Danger/peril and giant monster fights, with slamming, punching, choking, etc. Godzilla blows up a crab-type monster and showers yellow goo everywhere. Kong eats chunks of the creatures he's killed in battle, slurping stringy innards like spaghetti. He also rips open a hyena-type monster corpse and showers green guts all over himself. Bloody claw prints Human attacked and eaten by sentient tree roots. Outpost attacked, with a dead body seen underneath wreckage. Kong takes a young ape by the foot and swings it around for use as a weapon in a fight. Kong's paw is sliced open by sharp blade, as well as frozen and injured by frostbite. Ape heads displayed on poles. Character has a brief, angry rant about internet trolls.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent uses of "s--t," "ass," "hell," "damn," "God/oh my God." Character calls an internet troll a "trash bag."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Parents need to know.

Parents need to know that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the fifth film in Warner Bros.' MonsterVerse series. Violence, as expected, is the main issue. Expect lots of giant monster fights, with slamming, punching, and choking. Kong rips open a hyena-type monster corpse and showers green guts all over himself, as well as slurping up the innards of the creatures he's killed in battle. And Godzilla blows up a crab-type monster and showers yellow goo everywhere. Kong also takes a young ape by the foot and swings it around for use as a weapon in a fight. A sharp blade slices open Kong's paw, and a human is attacked and eaten by sentient tree roots. A dead body is seen underneath wreckage. Language includes infrequent uses of "s--t," "ass," "hell," "damn," and "God/oh my God." There's no sex or substance use of note. As usual, the monsters have more personality than the humans, and the story is too convoluted, but the big, boomy battles are fun. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (2)
Kids say (5)

Based on 2 parent reviews

Lots of fun, strong child lead

What's the story.

In GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, peace has been established, with Kong living in the subterranean realm of Hollow Earth and Godzilla roaming the surface world. Dr. Ilene Andrews ( Rebecca Hall ) keeps tabs on them both while raising young Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last surviving Iwi from Skull Island. Suddenly, Kong returns to the surface with a toothache, and Dr. Andrews calls in veterinarian Trapper ( Dan Stevens ) to help. Meanwhile, Godzilla stirs and starts traveling the world, absorbing enormous amounts of power. Dr. Andrews, Jia, Trapper, monster podcaster Bernie Hayes ( Brian Tyree Henry ), and pilot Mikael ( Alex Ferns ) accompany Kong back to Hollow Earth. There, Kong finally discovers a tribe of apes like himself, while the humans stumble upon evidence of an ancient civilization of Iwi. Everything leads up to a major showdown against an evil ape leader; to defeat him, Godzilla and Kong must bury the hatchet and work together.

Is It Any Good?

Par for the course for the MonsterVerse series, the monsters have more personality than the humans, but at least watching them battle and smash things has some visceral entertainment value. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has to find some way to get the two big guys to join forces, and it's a convoluted process, with so many steps -- including a "chosen one" and a prophecy -- that the humans are mostly just there as exposition machines who must keep explaining the plot every time the camera points at them. As a result, they're reduced to familiar cardboard cutout types. Brian Tyree Henry has the hardest job, whipping back and forth between being a nerd who's both excited about discovering all this monster stuff and a whimpering coward, like something right out of an old Abbott & Costello movie.

That said, the Hollow Earth design is truly gorgeous, and the monster fights (which include some new guest stars) land with a concrete impact. Truthfully, the computer-generated characters are so much better at telling the story, with their wordless gestures and expressions, that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire might have been better without any humans in it at all. But its biggest challenge may be that it's being released just months after the Oscar-winning Godzilla: Minus One , which was made for around a tenth of the cost of this one and is certainly 10 times better. There's more to monster movies than smashing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How does the movie convey the importance of empathy , courage and teamwork ? Why are those important character strengths ?

Some of the characters use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate. What makes that a form of positive representation ?

The first Japanese Godzilla filmmakers used monster suits and miniatures to create their special effects, not CGI. If you've seen the 1954 original (or its imitators), which do you prefer: low-tech practical effects, or something more realistic and high-tech? Which usually works better in movies?

Why do you think Godzilla has been remade so many times? What do you think filmmakers hope to achieve by remaking a classic?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 29, 2024
Cast : Rebecca Hall , Brian Tyree Henry , Dan Stevens
Director : Adam Wingard
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
Studio : Warner Bros. Pictures
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
Run time : 115 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : creature violence and action
Last updated : April 1, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Cast & crew
User reviews

Wicked Little Letters

When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that ... Read all When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that something is amiss, the town's women investigate. When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that something is amiss, the town's women investigate.

Thea Sharrock
Jonny Sweet
Olivia Colman
Jessie Buckley
Timothy Spall
68 User reviews
65 Critic reviews
54 Metascore

Rose Gooding

Edward Swan

Mr. Treading

Nancy Gooding

Constable Papperwick

Victoria Swan

Police Officer Gladys Moss

Father Ambrose

Chief Constable Spedding

Jury Foreman
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Trivia Although the actual events occurred in Littlehampton, the filming did not take place there. Instead nearby Arundel and Worthing were used. Arundel was used for town and street events. All the seaside filming was carried out in Worthing.
Goofs There are references to Rose's daughter been taken off her by the CPS; a modern organisation that begun in the 1980s.

[to her daughter, looking at the words Die Slut on her door]

Rose Gooding : It's German.

Connections Referenced in Amanda the Jedi Show: I ALMOST Walked Out | The Best and Worst of TIFF 2023 (2023)

User reviews 68

ethanbresnett
Feb 20, 2024
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April 5, 2024 (United States)
United Kingdom
Pequeñas cartas indiscretas
Arundel, West Sussex, England, UK
Blueprint Pictures
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Mar 31, 2024
$12,824,275

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
Dolby Digital

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Review: ‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ is monster math that becomes a headache

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Before the titan-sized title of “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” even flashes across the screen, director Adam Wingard has already delivered two impressively goopy moments courtesy of our lead characters: Kong rips a hyena-thing in half, green entrails spilling everywhere, while Godzilla squashes a giant bug in Rome, releasing great vats of yellow goo over the ancient city. It’s an indication of the colorfully excessive ethos that Wingard brings to this loaded monster jam, overflowing with kaiju creatures. Considering that much of the action takes place in the underworld known as Hollow Earth, you might even call this picture stuffed crust.

Wingard, who directed the neon-synth fever dream that was 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong,” comes from the world of horror films ( “You’re Next” ) and he brings that same approach to his blockbusters, with a penchant for gleeful experimentation and over-the-top style. He drives this vehicle like he stole it, and with co-writers Simon Barrett and Terry Rossio, seems to throw every idea he’s ever had for a monster movie at the script. It’s a lot. It’s fun, but it’s a lot.

On the plus side, Wingard has arguably three of the best working actors in the game: Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry reprise their roles from “Godzilla vs. Kong,” and Wingard brings along the star of his 2014 thriller “The Guest,” Dan Stevens, who possesses a kind of glowing charisma that’s almost too much to take in. With these three, you truly can’t go wrong and Henry and Stevens, playing, respectively, a podcaster and a wacky wild-animal veterinarian, prove to be the most valuable players of the movie (after the title characters, of course).

Three people stride forward with a purpose.

To quickly get us up to speed since the events of the last film: Kong now lives in the verdant paradise of Hollow Earth, which is nice but lonely, while Godzilla remains on the surface, very cutely napping in the Colosseum in between bouts of titan fighting. These two need to be kept apart, lest they rip each other to shreds, reducing major cities to rubble in the process. However, when a distress signal emerges from Hollow Earth, Dr. Andrews (Hall), her adopted tribal Iwi daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), her on-call vet Trapper (Stevens) and the fanboy blogger Bernie (Henry), along with a stern Scottish pilot Mikael (Alex Ferns), set out to find the origin of the call, and realize that maybe Godzilla and Kong need to find a way to come together to fight off other nefarious creatures.

When you multiply Godzilla by Kong, what do you get? When Wingard’s doing the math, it’s an earnest, wacky, hectic ride that often feels like being thrashed about in an Imax seat. There’s a decidedly 1980s-inspired vibe to the tone and style, from the hot pinks and greens and synthy score by Tom Holkenborg and Antonio Di Iorio, to the narrative that follows a journey into a fantastical underworld. There’s also a heavy emphasis on crystals as both plot device and aesthetic, offering this film a retro feel.

But about halfway through, one gets the nagging sensation that this entry has jumped the kaiju shark, as Wingard slams the gas and doesn’t let up. There are too many monsters and, as more and more are introduced, character falls away. It makes you long for the restrained elegance of Japan’s recent Oscar winner “Godzilla Minus One,” but this is a different beast entirely.

There’s a harried energy to “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” which is enjoyable until it becomes tiresome and deafening. Perhaps multiplication was too much — here’s hoping subtraction is next in the mathematical equation.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire'

Rating: PG-13, for creature violence and action Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Playing: In wide release Friday, March 29

‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ smashes its way to $80 million. How it won the box office

March 31, 2024

LOS ANGELES - MARCH 14, 2024: Director Adam Wingard at IMAX Headquarters in Playa Vista on Thursday, March 14, 2024. (Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

How do you direct ‘Godzilla x Kong’? Adam Wingard took performance notes from his cat

March 29, 2024

Review: At least the cast is having fun in the overstuffed ‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’

March 21, 2024

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4 out of 5 stars
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Time Out says

Dev Patel conceives, directs, produces, punches, stabs and brawls his way through this brash and frequently brilliant action flick

Boy, whatever happened to that nice kid from Skins and Lion ? The new Dev Patel is taking no prisoners in this slice of Mumbai mayhem, announcing himself as a filmmaker with possibly the most ferocious mainstream action movie since The Raid , and as an action star by sticking a knife into a goon’s neck. With his teeth.

The John Wick movies are an obvious touchpoint for the kind of revenge mission flick the Londoner is going for – it even namechecks the Keanu Reeves movies at one point – but he applies his own lens of grimy realism to the formula and adds some real political edge. Monkey Man is a gory hero’s journey embroidered with mythical folk traditions and laced with a stark commentary on India’s corrupt cops and seedy super-rich.

It opens with an explainer: Lord Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, is a courageous deity who is robbed of his powers, only to come back stronger than ever. That’s the arc the film charts, only with Patel’s unnamed ‘Kid’ in the role. He’s introduced wearing a monkey mask – an anonymous intro that’s an instant display of confidence, especially in a film with so few familiar faces – and being battered for measly amounts of cash in rigged back alley fights. Sharlto Copley’s sleazy impresario promises a bonus if his human punchbag spills blood.

The kid is a long way from the finished killing machine he needs to be to execute his mysterious revenge mission, but he’s got smarts from the get-go, pulling off an intricate con to inveigle his way into a low-level job within a criminal enterprise. The Raid – a film he matches for brute force – might just have inspired its geography, too: Patel’s guileful hero needs to (literally) work his way up the high-rise to gain access to a secret club where India’s corrupt one percent party.

This may be the most ferocious action movie since The Raid

The motivation behind this quest is teased via perhaps one too many flashbacks to his boyhood village life and the death of his mum (Adithi Kalkunte). But Patel’s story finds lots of topical political subtext in showing the super-rich, spiritual leaders and the police in league to rob and oppress the poor.

There’s heart, too, much of it coming from a subplot involving India’s hijras – an oppressed trans group who, refreshingly, are no meek victims of this rigged system.

If Monkey Man is a rare action movie to boast some committed LGBTQ+ shit-kicking, it also throws in a few other Indian twists, including a turbocharged rickshaw and all the local colour of this Indian metropolis by night captured in a blur by a perpetually moving camera. At times, that’s as much a flaw as a strength, with one or two of the lengthy action sequences – pieced together in the quickest of cuts – tiptoeing towards overkill. Your temple will throb. Then again, it feels like that’s what Dev Patel had in mind. In UK and US cinemas Apr 5 .

Cast and crew

Director: Dev Patel
Screenwriter: John Collee, Paul Angunawela
Sharlto Copley
Sobhita Dhulipala
Sikandar Kher
Adithi Kalkunte

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Godzilla, left, and Kong warm up for the next bout in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire review – another bout of monster stupidity

Rebecca Hall bravely emcees the show as our two giant friends come back for an action-packed, plausibility-free slugfest

T his sequel to the big monkey versus big lizard smackdown (2021’s Godzilla vs Kong ) finds Kong moping in Hollow Earth while Godzilla listlessly lumbers around the surface world. But it would take more than a geologically improbable parallel dimension to keep these two apart, and returning director Adam Wingard ups the ante with yet more huge, furious creatures. Rebecca Hall, as titan specialist Ilene, is mainly required to explain the plot between battle sequences; Brian Tyree Henry, playing monster-blogger Bernie, provides incredulous double-takes; Dan Stevens’s Trapper brings Hawaiian shirts and devil-may-care rashness to the mix. Dumbed-down and stripped of the symbolic subtext of the earlier movies, the picture is not without seat-shuddering thrills, but it’s like a tag-team wrestling bout for monsters rather than a picture with meaning and even a modicum of thought.

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IMAGES

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COMMENTS

The English movie review & film summary (2022)
This is a drama about lands shaped by violence and eroded by vengeance, a genre exercise with fantastic performances and film-caliber technical elements. Western fans definitely won't want to miss it. After a prologue that details the tumultuous state of existence in middle America in 1890, "The English" thrusts its two protagonists ...
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The plot is nonsense, but writer-director Hugo Blick lets Blunt and her co-stars shine in this tale of an English noblewoman on a revenge mission in 1890s America. Alan Sepinwall's review
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The English: Created by Hugo Blick. With Chaske Spencer, Emily Blunt, Tom Hughes, Steve Wall. Follows a woman as she seeks revenge on the man she sees as responsible for the death of her son.
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Chaske Spencer and Emily Blunt in "The English" Diego Lopez Calvin / Prime Video. Despite his early predicament, Whipp's path soon intersects with Cornelia's. She claims it's magic — a ...
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Diego Lopez Calvin/Drama Republic/BBC/Amazon Studios. The English tells, in many ways, a simple revenge story. Its first episode introduces Blunt's Cornelia Locke and then reveals that she, like ...
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As it turns out, maybe not to the American West circa 1890. In writer/director Hugo Blick's uneven revisionist Western, she plays Lady Cornelia Locke. The tragic British aristocrat travels ...
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The English resonates with its gritty, lived-in atmosphere, and it never loses sight of the humanity at the heart of this tragic tale. No matter how brutal, how bloody, how blistering the quest ...
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The English ( BBC Two) is halfway to being a masterpiece. It is a bold, brutal Western - a revisionist take, because is there now any other kind? - with moments of beauty and ugliness to put ...
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Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer are fantastic in Prime Video's new series, elevating an intentionally murky mystery into an unforgettable, six-part Western epic.
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Beyond the realistic." In 1903, 13 years after her journey in America and Melmont's death, Cornelia is exhibiting the phase 4 effects of syphilis on her face, a "shame" she hides beneath a black ...
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The English Review: Saddle Up and Enjoy This Compelling Chase Western. By Greg Archer. Published Nov 9, 2022. Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer, and a stellar cast fuel creator Hugo Blick's passionate ...
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Prime Video Season 1. Watch The English with a subscription on Prime Video. Emily Blunt. Cornelia Locke. Chaske Spencer. Eli Whipp. Stephen Rea. Sheriff Robert Marshall. Ciarán Hinds.
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The English (TV Mini Series 2022)
The English is a slow burn, beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, with a story that develops gradually over the six episodes. Chaske Spencer is absolutely spellbinding as Eli Whipp, the Indian scout who accompanies the always excellent Emily Blunt as she traverses the American Midwest on her revenge mission.
'La Chimera' review: This Italian fable features a magical movie ending
The wonderful 42-year-old filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher practices a kind of cinema that I've come to think of as "Italian magical neorealism." She gives us portraits of hard-scrabble lives in poor ...
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Common Sense Media reviewers include writers, editors, and child development experts. They're trained in creating high-quality parenting advice based on best practices in child development. Amid the somewhat convoluted story is a theme of teamwork, as the monsters must learn to trust one another and ...
Wicked Little Letters (2023)
Wicked Little Letters: Directed by Thea Sharrock. With Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall, Jason Watkins. When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that something is amiss, the town's women investigate.
'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' review: A roaring headache
An unusually accomplished cast of human actors, including Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry and Dan Stevens, gets lost in a hectic, overloaded aesthetic.
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Dev Patel conceives, directs, produces, punches, stabs and brawls his way through this brash and frequently brilliant action flick The John Wick movies are an obvious touchpoint for the kind of ...
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Rebecca Hall bravely emcees the show as our two giant friends come back for an action-packed, plausibility-free slugfest

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Amazon’s The English Is a Stunning Western That Reimagines America’s Founding Fantasy

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Emily Blunt’s Ultra-Violent Western ‘The English’ Tells How the West Was Lost

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The English review: an occasionally transcendent Western

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The English Review: A Gorgeous And Gruesome Tale Of Vengeance In The Old West

Bound by fate

Elegantly depicted misery

Star-crossed lovers

'The English' on Prime Video: The Ending Explained and Your Questions Answered

Spoilers ahead and a content warning: sexual violence, suicide

Who killed Lady Cornelia Locke's son?

What were Melmont and Trafford doing in Wyoming?

What happened at the Massacre at Chalk River?

How did Melmont kill Cornelia's son?

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The English Review: Saddle Up and Enjoy This Compelling Chase Western

The Acting in The English

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