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Inevitably the Angel media company and streaming platform, rebranded from Angel Studios in 2025, has remade the 1947 John Wayne project “Angel and the Badman,” and not just for the angelic title. It’s actually the third
iteration; a 2009 Hallmark Channel adaptation, shot in wintry British Columbia instead of the dusty, sandy American West, starred Lou Diamond Phillips and Deborah Kara Unger. The latest, directed by Julio Quintana, stars Zachary Levi and is fitfully diverting, draped with calming New Mexico scenery.
The first version, Wayne’s self-financed debut as producer as well as star, came from Republic Pictures and veteran screenwriter James Edward Grant, who went on to write another 11 Wayne films. The gamble was in Wayne’s decision to hire Grant as a first-time director. Intriguingly balanced sagebrush-and-six-gun romcom one minute, leisurely drama of redemption the next, “Angel and the Badman” presented Wayne as Quirt Evans, a gunman and cattle rustler saved from his violent past and and varmint future by a chance encounter with a Quaker frontier family. The Worth clan, especially the demure yet hungry-eyed adult daughter Penny, played by Gail Russell, nurses Quirt back to health after his opening-credits shootout with the Laredo gang — of which Quirt’s a member, looking to get out.
Of the three, the first movie remains the most compelling. It wasn’t the first Quaker oater — “The Lady from Cheyenne” preceded it, and “High Noon” and “Cheyenne Autumn” followed, along with the not-actual-Western “Friendly Persuasion” — but it’s most character-specific and flavorful of the versions. The new film, with its blend of Christian virtues and righteous bloodshed, may well connect with audiences hip to distributor Angel’s business model guided by “values-based” stories (per the website language) that “amplify light and bring more goodness into the world,” and “reintroduce positive values to the entertainment industry.”
What works here? Tommy Lee Jones certainly does, in the old Harry Carey role of the wily, philosophical U.S. Marshall who has his eye on Quirt and the Laredo gang. He’s 80 years old, and thankfully Jones hasn’t done anything to look otherwise. But his voice is higher now, and his delivery of even the cardboard-iest of lines offers witty little payoffs. The downside of Jones being the upside of his own movie is simple: There are times when you’d rather be watching a whole movie about this guy.
As Quirt, Zachary Levi is, well, a number of different things. A lot of his role, as written, leans into anachronistic wisenheimer mode, with rejoinders like “goodbyes ain’t never really been my thing” or, when rescuing the woman he loves from a fate worse than death, a quippy “Sorry I’m late!” Elsewhere in the film, Quirt must reckon with the legacy of brutality left to him by his father, and by his own livelihood in recent years. Levi can’t reconcile the tonal swings, but he’s proficient, if more in the vein of Jason Sudekis/Ted Lasso than in the creation of dimensional dark angel. (That title always referred to two angels, not one.)
The Quaker religion has been replaced here by all-purpose Christian belief and believers represented, variously, by the townsfolk — it’s a very small town with very few extras — and this remake’s depiction of the Worth family. Meg Fraser’s scrappy, yearning Penny works well enough, though visually and in terms of character, “Angel and the Badman” smoothes much of the western texture and atmosphere. Allowing for the notion of brand new towns uneasily sprouting alongside the railroad tracks, the film shows us little of life, and stuff, as it might have looked in the 19th-century west. Every belt buckle looks freshly yanked off the rack; every speck of signage resembles something painted 45 minutes before filming commenced that day.
Cinematographer and editor Alex Quintana’s lighting, cutting and shot design — to the degree he worked with the director on the third element — gets the job done without fuss but also without distinction, or surprises. Frustratingly, the first shot of the film is the strongest: a well-judged long-distance view of a lone rider on the horizon, after we’ve heard gunshots from off-screen, soon joined by horsemen in pursuit. We’ve seen a few like it before, but this one’s framed judiciously, and doesn’t look or feel like just another reenactment of a cliche.
The frustration arrives all too soon. There’s very little piety in the 1947 film, and there’s serious chemistry between Wayne and Russell. The new “Angel and the Badman” trades those virtues for plenty of sanctimony and not much of a spark.
