Alec Baldwin Plays a Cold Outlaw with a Heart of Gold

“Rust,” as the whole world knows, is a movie that was the seat of a horrific on-set tragedy. During the shooting of a scene at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Alec Baldwin, who is the film’s star and one of its producers, discharged a gun that was being used as a prop and that somehow contained live rounds. (After all the recriminations and indictments and lawyers and trials and global media scrutiny, it has never been remotely determined how those rounds found their way onto the set or into the chamber of that gun.) The weapon went off, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and injuring the director, Joel Souza.

Now that “Rust” has been completed and is finally being released (on May 2, simultaneously in theaters and on streaming), this terrible event regrettably but inevitably places “Rust” on that small but dicey roster of films that become famous because someone got violently killed in the process of making them. Is it part of the tainted karma of this category that the films themselves end up struggling to justify their existence? Vic Morrow was beheaded by a helicopter blade during the shooting of the John Landis episode of “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), and that episode was easily the film’s worst. Brendan Lee was killed by a gunshot during the filming of “The Crow” (1994), and since his character, a rock ‘n’ roller who is murdered and resurrected, presided over the movie like a ghost, the slipshod slovenliness of “The Crow” only seemed to heighten the senselessness of Lee’s death.

“Rust” is a better movie than either of those. It’s a handsome and watchable indie art Western, set in 1882, that turns into a sentimental cross-generational buddy film. Yet I can’t say that the movie, in the end, is especially good. It’s got a bare-bones plot, it lopes along more than it takes wing, and for no good reason it’s two hours and 19 minutes long.

Baldwin,…