Wickensburg – Film Review

There’s a certain quality to Richard Boddington‘s Wickensburg that feels so incredibly cheap despite having some admittedly fun ideas, even if they, too, can be a bit familiar. It’s a highly strange film for that reason. So much of this film on paper should’ve worked. It should’ve been a big ‘ol campy blast but instead, it’s just… kinda… bad.

It also doesn’t help that the film looks as if it was made on a high-school student’s budget. The lighting in nearly every scene looks poorly done, as does the overall cinematography. Because of just how all over the place everything on display looks, the film really doesn’t even have a visual tone, either.

Films such as Barbarian and Nope have a certain tone that’s further propelled by the excellent atmosphere brought on by the incredible cast and crew. With Nope, the film has a certain sense of overbearing dread that looms over you the entire time. With Wickensburg, everything just kind of feels like a commercial. There’s no atmosphere.

And I know this is a family film so it’s not going to be super moody or anything, but I was at least hoping to see some flavor injected into the way the film looked. Aside from all of the film’s technical and visual issues, it’s just downright bland in terms of its storytelling.

There’s, of course, a MacGuffin and there’s a town that harbors a “dark” secret that really isn’t all that dark at all. Despite feeling similar in a lot of ways to Hocus Pocus 2, it managed to be more enjoyable than that film was. I think that’s a more well-made movie, but the experience of having to watch just how bad Hocus Pocus 2 was, was much worse.

The performances here aren’t anything to rave about either, unfortunately. They’re not all bad, necessarily, but they’re certainly wooden. Jensen Gering oftentimes looks as though he’s reading things off of cue cards in many scenes, and Denise Richards looks straight-up bored while being in the film. Did she even have any passion for this project? If she did, it definitely didn’t show.

Wickensburg is an extremely formulaic and predictable mess of a family adventure film that could’ve benefited from some script rewrites and a higher budget.