Joe Wainwright doesn’t scare easy. Few bull riders do.
To be a bull rider means wrapping a rope around a literal ton of spinning, twisting meat and muscle, and then holding onto that rope—with one hand—for eight seconds. To be a bull rider means accepting broken legs and busted ribs as a fair trade for a paycheck, to know that each ride might be your last.
“Cowboys don’t cry,” wrote Sports Illustrated’s E.M. Swift in 1993. “It’s, like, this rule. Baseball players didn’t cry, either, until they became multimillionaires and began to remove themselves from the lineup every time they felt a little stiffness in a shoulder. To a rodeo cowboy a little stiffness means he’s wearing a cast.”
Joe knows all about casts. He’s broken more bones than Tom Brady has broken records. He’s seen the inside of more hospitals than the whole cast of Gray’s Anatomy. He’s felt more pain than most of us can imagine.
No, Joe Wainwright doesn’t scare easy. But cancer? It terrifies him.
Joe’s wife, Rose, died from brain tumor. And there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop it. After she left, a piece of Joe went with her. He drank and punched and rode his way through grief. And when he started riding bulls drunk, Joe almost joined her. He took a bad spill and broke his neck: His daughter, Sally, spent months caring for him ‘til Joe was able to walk again.
That was 15 years ago. He hasn’t been on a bull since.
Joe’s relationship with Sal suffered its own bumps and bruises. But nothing ever broke for good. And Sal’s own son, Cody, idolizes his grandfather. He’s sure that Joe’s the best bull rider ever, and he’d love to follow his “Pops” into the rodeo arena.
“You can make a lot more money on a diamond than you can on a bull,” Joe tells him. But that baseball diamond isn’t without its own share of danger, too.
During a youth baseball game, a ball bounces off Cody’s bat and hits him in the head. He shakes it off. But soon, he’s feeling woozy. Throwing up all over the kitchen floor. Joe and Sal take him to a doctor, who suggests they drive into Dallas. Like, right now.
So they do. And when the big-city doc takes a look at Cody’s X-rays, he sees a tumor. Like the one that killed Rose.
Cancer treatment has come a long way since Rose’s day, though. The Dallas doctor says that the hospital actually specializes in this sort of thing. But the operation won’t be cheap, and insurance won’t pay for it all. And even if they find the money for the surgery, it’s a delicate procedure. There are no guarantees.
Sal wonders how they can possibly raise the cash her son needs. But Joe knows. Old friend Jimmy Mack is producing a bull riding legends competition, featuring the world’s top competitors in the Professional Bull Riders association. He invited some former champs to the party, too—including the legendary Joe Wainwright. All Joe needs to do is get on a few bulls (for the first time in 15 years), ride them for the requisite eight seconds (a feat no 50-year-old has ever done) and beat the world’s best to claim a $750,000 first-place check.
Sure, a challenge like that might leave other cowboys quaking in their boots. But Joe? He doesn’t scare easy.
“I gotta commend y’all for your guts,” a medic tells Joe at one point. “I’m not gonna say what you got in the brains department.”
That might be particularly fair in Joe’s case. One can reasonably question the wisdom of anyone getting on a bull—much less someone who’s 50 years old and who nearly died the last time he did so. But that said, Joe’s not back in the arena for his own fame and glory: He’s doing it for his grandson. He needs money for the boy now. And apart from robbing a bank, this seems like the easiest potential way to get it quickly. It might not be smart, but it is sacrificial.
Joe doesn’t go on this adventure alone. He reunites with an old pal of his, Charlie Williams. After Rose died, Joe and Charlie’s friendship took some hits. “You fell to pieces,” Charlie reminds him. “And I called you out. Because that’s what friends do.” But while Joe cut off all contact for a while, Charlie’s still there for him—still keeping his spirits up and still calling him out, sometimes in the same breath. He offers sage advice at every turn. When Joe gets angry that Charlie told some other people about Cody’s tumor—telling Charlie that he doesn’t want to accept help from strangers—Charlie offers this stern reminder: “It’s for Cody! Good night blue cheese, Joe, it ain’t about you!”
Jimmy Mack offers Joe plenty of help, too—giving the bull rider what he needs at every turn. (He admits that he’s returning a favor for Joe’s support long ago.)
And we can’t forget Sal, who comes to the story with her own wellspring of strength. And while Joe might be willing to sacrifice life and limb for his grandson, Sal reminds him who sacrificed for him 15 years ago, after his devastating injury. Instead of going to prom, she found herself as Joe’s nursemaid. “I had to clean you, feed you, bathe you, walk you. For how long?”
Joe hesitates. “Long time,” he admits.
Sal starts the movie still nursing some bitterness for that wasted time. But by movie’s end, she’s found a new sense of peace. And she chooses to forgive her father for what he put her through.
“I can’t keep blaming you for what I haven’t experienced, what I haven’t done, what I haven’t become,” she tells him. “I’ve just got to let go and move forward.”
The Last Rodeo, from Angel Studios, doesn’t make faith its centerpiece. But very organically, the movie reminds us how important faith can and should be.
Joe wants nothing to do with faith and God throughout most of the film. “You can preach to me all you want, Charlie, but you have no idea what I’m feeling,” he says.
But Charlie, the story’s standard-bearer for faith, stubbornly prods Joe to give faith another chance. Charlie reads his Bible constantly. He gives Joe a cross necklace to wear when he’s riding. He tries to illustrate Christianity’s relevance by flipping through the Bible and encouraging Joe to pick out a verse at random. When Joe picks a page and Charlie points at a verse, it turns out to be relevant indeed: “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak,” Charlie says, quoting Isaiah 40:29.
Charlie reminds him that after Rose died, he was furious with God, blaming the Almighty for that devastating loss. Charlie recalls that Joe’s anger not only alienated him from God, but pushed him away from his friends, too. And Charlie admits he could’ve used a friend.
“If I hadn’t just looked up, found my faith, I don’t believe I’d ‘ve made it,” he tells him.
Charlie’s wife, Agisa, also has faith—though her own beliefs are harder to pin down. She appears to be of Native American heritage, and she tells Joe and Sal that she “said praise to the Creator this morning.” Later, Agisa tells Sal that she was taught that “time is a conceit. A Western notion.”
Someone leads the entire bull-riding audience in a prayer. “Gracious heavenly Father, we have gathered here tonight for fun, for entertainment,” the man says. But then he asks God to watch over the competitors. (While the rest of the bull riders bow their heads and pray, too, Joe stares straight ahead.)
Joe’s attitude toward God does soften eventually—but it takes some time, and the transition is surprisingly subtle.
In one sequence, Joe seems to see Rose, his dead wife, sitting in the stands.
We catch a glimpse of a woman’s midriff at a bar. Through flashbacks and old home videos, we see snippets of Joe’s relationship with his wife—which includes a tender dance and a wedding kiss.
Cody’s father apparently isn’t in the picture, and Joe asks Sal about the beau she’d been dating. She said she’s seeing him, but not dating him. “Too clingy,” she tells him. At Cody’s baseball game, a woman seems to show some interest in Joe from across the stands—staring and giggling a little. Joe ignores her.
Joe takes off his shirt in a dressing room a time or two.
Plenty of sports can get violent. But few others carry with them such a huge risk of serious injury.
Cowboys are violently whipped around even during a successful ride. And when the ride is over, more often than not, they’re flung from the bull and land hard in the dirt. Most of the time they scramble to safety, but not always. A bull steps on Joe after one ride. In another, the bull grinds his leg against the chute gate: In a curious bit of “luck,” Joe reveals that he lost feeling in that leg a long time before. The bull rider breaks several ribs, but he convinces the medic to tape him up and clear him to ride anyway. When we get a glimpse of Joe’s exposed torso one time, it’s covered in bruises.
Both Joe and Charlie carry old injuries with them. Joe’s neck and back still bear a scar where doctors operated: Sal reminds him that in the aftermath, when he wasn’t on painkillers, he’d beg Sal to kill him. Charlie was a bull rider too, once, until he injured his hand. Though it looks perfectly normal now, Jimmy Mack hesitates to shake it—remembering how mangled it once was.
Cody’s doing his best to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. When he competes in a steer-riding competition, he gets his eight seconds and lands in the dirt as his worried mother looks on. His baseball injury looks far more serious at first, when a ball fouls off his bat and strikes him in the head. He’s knocked down by the blow, but he soon gets up and finishes his at bat.
Joe and Charlie get into a fight with a few other bull riders. Punches are thrown and people get knocked down. And while no one’s seriously hurt, it reminds both Charlie and Jimmy Mack of Joe’s violent past. (Joe also punches a hole in a wall.)
When watching the current bull riding champion on TV, Cody expresses his belief that his gramps could “kick his a–.” Joe tells him to watch his language, but that doesn’t keep Cody from saying the word again. Others use it, too. And we hear a few uses of “d–n” and “h—” as well. There’s also a crude slang reference to testicles.
Joe had a drinking problem in his younger days. And when Jimmy Mack hands Charlie and Joe glasses of whisky for a toast, Joe tries to refuse and eventually puts the glass down, the liquor inside untouched. (We see him drink from what look like beer bottles, but Charlie says that they’re actually filled with root beer.)
Other characters do drink, however, and an important scene takes place in a bar. Sal says she could use a stiff drink at one point.
Cody vomits on the floor. We don’t see him do it, but we do witness the resulting mess. Bull riders engage in some name-calling, trash-talking and, occasionally, a bit of antagonizing behavior.
Sure, The Last Rodeo comes with its share of clichés, pulling liberally from feel-good sports movies to feel-good Christian dramas. A 50-year-old cowboy competing against guys literally half his age for his woefully ill grandson? And getting ready to do so in a few hours? Man, most over-the-hill athletes in movies usually get to train for at least a couple of weeks.
But if you can accept The Last Rodeo’s central improbabilities, you find yourself wrapped up in a strong, and surprisingly nuanced, family drama.
Granted, setting that drama in the world of bull riding helps. Few sports are quite as cinematic, and there’s something inherently thrilling about watching these man-versus-beast contests: You don’t need to be a rodeo or bull-riding fan to appreciate the shared athleticism you see spinning on that dirt—and the courage it takes to get on one of those animals in the first place.
But in the midst of all the action and the straightforward story, you see hints of bigger, broader stories that inform what we see: Sal’s fractured relationship with her father. Jimmy Mack’s gratitude toward this one-time bull-riding star. Charlie and Joe’s shared history. And it all comes to light, in part, because of some strong performances. Sarah Jones as Sally Wainwright deserves a special mention: When she realizes how much money she’ll need to raise to pay for her son’s surgery, you can see about a half-dozen emotions run through her before she says a single word.
The movie’s faith elements are equally subtle. Charlie may preach at Joe, but the movie itself plays it cool. It reminds us that God can help us through life’s most difficult trials, but it does so by acknowledging that those trials are difficult: Faith can help us bear them. But it doesn’t make them easy.
The Last Rodeo can feel a little uneven at times. And if you’re expecting squeaky-clean entertainment here, you might look elsewhere. Drinking, a bit of swearing and some pretty immature behavior might mar the experience slightly for some. Like bull riding itself, the film can get a wee bit rough. But if you feel the content is navigable and you hold on ‘til the whistle, The Last Rodeo comes with a nice payoff.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
