This film managed to pull in numbers at the box office quite similar to what an low-level accountant makes in a year and for me anyway, it is easy to understand why. This movie is boring, many of the roles are mis-cast, and well, it is a western and it's tough to make westerns interesting.
There are so many things wrong with this film but I'll just mention a few. For starters, the immoral city that the entire film centers around, seems to have a population of 6 people or so - It doesn't appear as though they hired any extras for the movie at all. During almost every scene, the place simply looks like a high-school project where only the people with speaking roles are even on set. I would imagine in retrospect that this was probably a great money-saver because ouch, is the rest of it bad.
The story friggin crawls and it is extremely unoriginal. Drifter / independent tough guy with a dog strolls into town only to become the focus of a local bully and then later embarrass said local bully who happens to be well-connected with the other 5 people that live in the city. They exact their revenge on the drifter in a cowardly manor and think they killed him, yet he survived and now he has to kill all the people in the village. It is telegraphed early on that he is going to succeed in this endeavor.
Ethan Hawke is not a believable tough guy, and John Travolta is not a believable really anything these days. Travolta's character, dialogue-delivery, and just his physical appearance adds nothing to the film... if anything it takes away from what is already an extremely weak story.
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I can only imagine that Jonno was hired because of name recognition and the fact that he doesn't carry a big paycheck anymore
The film carries on at an extremely slow pace due mostly to the fact that there isn't any real story here: It's a tired concept that has been done in hundreds if not thousands of westerns already. This film easily could have been 15 minutes long and even then it would have been slow.
I can't be sure why this film only opened in a handful of theaters but I would like to think that there is at least a shred of integrity in Hollywood and upon finishing the film they realized they had a turd on their hands and figured it wasn't worth the hassle. Shown at a mere 33 theaters across the U.S. The film managed to pull in a whopping $900 or so per screen and it remained in any theater for a mere 2 weeks.
Something else that makes zero sense to me is the professional critics actually praised this piece of crud. When stuff like this happens I can't help but think that these critics are afraid to say what they really think out of fear of backlash of major studios (Universal Pictures was involved with this one.)
On a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give In a Valley of Violence a well-deserved and heartfelt.....
not quite Amy Schumer stand-up-comedy-bad.... but it's close