Diablo movie review & film summary (2016)

“But who prays for Satan?” an onscreen quote by Mark Twain asks at the beginning of the film. (The answer is Satan’s grandmother, but I digress.) We are next informed that it’s 1872, seven years after the Civil War. Jackson fought under General Sherman, and as “Diablo” opens, Jackson’s wife has been kidnapped by the folks who torched his house. “She’s been taken,” Jackson explains to anyone who will listen, and one hopes he’ll have a particular set of skills to get her back. The kidnappers spoke Spanish, so Jackson heads toward Mexico. Along the way, he encounters Walton Goggins and Danny Glover, both of whom deserve better.

Jackson seeks help from Glover’s character, whom he fought alongside during the war. Before they meet up, Jackson receives help from some Indians who tend to his wounds and offer him peyote. (The ensuing hallucination is not only poorly executed, it cribs from, of all things, “An American Werewolf in London.”) For their troubles, the Indians all wind up dead. In fact, anyone who tries to help Jackson winds up dead. That the victims are all minorities made me briefly consider that perhaps screenwriter Carlos de los Rios was attempting some kind of statement about American manifest destiny. Considering how preposterous this movie becomes, I realized I was giving the screenplay too much credit.

At least Goggins brings a smarmy, slimy, threatening energy to the film. His character is a major cop-out that you’ll see coming long before the big reveal. But he makes the most of his miniscule screen time by cutting a dashing figure of evil, the rather seductive kind one might expect from Old Scratch himself. By contrast, Glover is little more than onscreen collateral damage. He provides some crucial information to the viewer regarding Jackson’s character before buying the farm. Glover’s tense scene with Goggins, which serves as the last appearance of either actor, is the moment “Diablo” becomes irredeemably bad.