‘Ride’ (2024) Review – A Dramatic Western That Is More Metaphor Than Movie

Bull riding is almost too good a metaphor for life. Think about it: We spend the early years of our lives in safe enclosures, familiar confines where nothing can touch us or knock us off balance. Inherently, we grow accustomed to this comfort, only for it to be pulled away in an instant by the opening of a gate, if you will. What follows may be a sort of freedom, but it’s not always in our control. It’s a bucking, jerky ride that is rarely balanced and forces us to hang on for as long as we can. When we inevitably get tossed from the bull of life’s back, it’s imperative that we get up, and ride again. After all, it’s about how long you’re able to hang on, not how often you fall off.

Whether or not this metaphor – or any, for that matter – can be extended into a near two-hour feature film is another question entirely, one that Jake Allyn attempts to answer with his directorial debut, Ride. Part familial drama, part Western thriller, Allyn’s film is desperate to find connective tissue between real-life struggles and all of its many beats. In some cases, like comparing one character’s rodeo escapades to his struggles with sobriety, it works. Far more often, though, it unfolds like the most predictable narrative work I’ve seen this year, a frustrating fate for a project with a great deal of emotional resonance at its fingertips. 

Allyn, who not only directed and co-wrote the film but stars in it, plays Peter, an alcoholic and addict who has recently been released from prison after serving four years for vehicular manslaughter. The accident that put him away killed a passenger and injured his younger sister, Virginia (Zia Carlock). It also led to Peter’s estrangement from his parents, John (C. Thomas Howell) and Monica (Annabeth Gish); John is a former rodeo star, while Monica is the sheriff of Stephenville, Texas, where Ride takes place. Though the crash did lead to the lucky-but-unlucky discovery that Virginia has cancer, John and Monica find it difficult to forgive their son, something not at all aided by his addictive nature resurfacing as soon as he tastes fresh air. 

Since neither of his parents visited him whilst in the slammer, Peter is unaware of Virginia’s condition, though not for too long. Once he learns of his sister’s diagnosis, Peter’s motivations for taking home the heaps of prize money bull riding has to offer shift from (solely) wanting to score drugs to helping the family pay for her uber-expensive treatment. (Their insurance won’t cover it.) Of course, he requires drugs to boost his abilities in the ring, so some of his winnings are used to fuel that habit, but he intends to use a chunk of it to help his family pay for Virginia’s care.

Given that Ride is a quasi-thriller and not your traditional weepy, an extra element is added to the story, one that sees it wander somewhat aimlessly into murky waters more often associated with traditional crime dramas. Peter persuades his father to help him unsuspectedly rob his long-time dealer, Tyler (Patrick Murney), to cover the rest of the cost. Of course, his actions have consequences, leading to a series of overlong sequences in which Monica investigates the crime, has a hunch that her son is involved, and has to weigh the consequences of her own actions: Should she protect her already-fragile family, or stay true to her duties as sheriff? 

These threads don’t become knotted so much as they form a distracting patchwork of ideas rather than cohesive narratives. On paper, they meld together nicely, but in execution, they become strained storylines that require stronger, subtler writing to operate at the pace they deserve. It’s not that Allyn and co-writer Josh Plasse (who plays Peter’s brother, Noah; are there any crew members that didn’t also act in this movie?) have a bad script, per se, just an overwritten one that leaves little room for viewers to have their own thematic interpretation of what’s playing out or being said on screen.  

Take the choice to intercut a performance from Noah’s singer girlfriend Libby (Laci Kaye Booth) with the aforementioned robbery. She introduces her song by noting that she loves the town of Stephenville because “we’re not perfect, but we’re all heart… Just good people trying to do what’s right, no matter what it takes.” She continues, saying “No matter how small we might feel, or how many times we get beat down, I just really believe the worst situations in life can be what bring us together.” It spells out the significance of Peter and John’s reunion as if it wasn’t already evident that they put aside their resentment towards one another in favor of coming together to help a loved one. All the while, Allyn and editor Owen Jackson place shots of Virginia watching Libby’s performance from her hospital bed. A moment for the imagination to operate on its own would’ve been welcome. 

Despite its telegraphic tendencies, much of Ride does represent the emergence of a confident filmmaker with a knack for visuals and for propping up strong performances. C. Thomas Howell steals the show with his emotional range, jockeying between anguish and fury at every turn, while Allyn’s turn as Peter, despite being somewhat monotonous, is a strong, lived-in portrayal of an addict who desperately wants to quit the things that are killing him yet can’t quite find a way to let go. (Feel free to insert your preferred bull riding metaphor here.) 

The film’s technicality might just be its strongest asset, likely due to the fact that its director and many of its stars have rodeo backgrounds. You can truly feel that Ride knows the world in which it’s set, from a rider’s attire to the stadium’s ambiance. (As for the film’s other principle world, that of addiction, it features one of the strongest cinematic recreations of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction.) To a similar end, the film also works well as a comment on the state of this country, a critical assessment of the nation’s inability to provide – or disinterest in offering – adequate and affordable health care options to those in dire need of attention. It’s agonizing, watching John panic when he realizes how much Virginia’s treatment will cost, his brain filling up with fears of the worst should he not be able to scrape together enough money to take just the first step in extending his little girl’s life.

If nothing else, Ride will give you plenty to ponder, if not to hold onto, from an emotional standpoint as it weaves its way through complicated family dynamics and its character’s troubling if necessary measures to achieve a common goal. In many ways, bull riding serves as a solid metaphor for the film itself: It’s rarely stable, an imbalanced exercise in control, yet often manages to be thrilling. Sure, most of its thrills result in big falls that leave you wishing it could have held on just a little longer. But at its best, it gets your heart pumping in more ways than one. Think of it as Allyn’s first rodeo. Ideally, the only way for him to go from here is up. 

Ride is currently playing in select theaters and is available On Demand courtesy of Well Go USA.