I think I know what the filmmakers in general, and Letitia Wright in particular was trying to achieve here, but it just didn't work for me. You don't score points in a Western with excessive display of a down-angled face under a wide brimmed cowboy hat trying to exude menace when the character is a woman. How the attempted ruse fooled so many people I don't understand. The character of Mo Washington (Wright) only looked like a man as long as you didn't look too hard, and the voice was a dead giveaway. If the story didn't try so hard it probably would have been a lot better because the premise was a good one but the execution was just too unbelievable. The first time Mo got waylaid by one of the outlaws outweighing her by twice as much she should have been a goner. The ones she managed to take out however showed cunning, but they were achieved from a distance, like shooting Dakota with an arrow from the top of a tree. Placing the corpses of all the dead bad boys around the tree might have looked good, but how did she manage to drag all those bodies where she needed them to convince the posse that they took each other out? It's just too much of a stretch, which to the credit of old Sheriff Wheeler (Jeffrey Donovan), was willing to look the other way. The best part of the picture for me was the rugged, almost unnatural scenery; the stark white winter landscape of the New Mexico outlands looked positively surreal. Maybe an A for effort here if one wants to go that far, but in general, the execution here was similar to that of B Westerns of the Forties and Fifties, but with a better budget.
Review of Surrounded
