the traveller returns

Chris Stapleton shreds through fifth RodeoHouston show with Tennessee whiskey-fueled, outlaw country ride

The dreariest, rainiest day at RodeoHouston this season (Thursday, March 16) cosmically coincided with Chris Stapleton's return to the neon cow and pony show. Maybe five songs in his growing discography match a sunny day, with the rest better suited for sepia-toned confrontations on prairies or a chilly kitchen table divorce request.

One of the biggest-selling country acts in recent history, Stapleton's pop culture seemingly knows no bounds of ubiquity. For the coming decades, generations will talk about hearing Stapleton throughout their lives. Sunday mornings spent fending for yourself in the kitchen for breakfast while Mom and Dad are blaring "Tennessee Whiskey" from the bedroom. The single mom in the school pick-up line wearing dark shades, playing "Broken Halos" until Spotify cries uncle. The emo cowpoke feeding the internet jukebox repeated plays of "Fire Away" at Buffalo Wild Wings at lunchtime. Making an NFL head coach projectile cry during his rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl.

Since his widescreen LP debut in 2015 with Traveller, Stapleton has done nearly everything in the industry besides winning a Tony or an Oscar. It wouldn't be surprising if somewhere under all that dirty blonde beard and Stetson is a Broadway show about a cattle rustler with a heart of fool's gold or a dirgy film score to end all film scores.

By the way, Traveller currently sits at No. 56 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, a mere eight years since the album's release. That kind of longevity is usually reserved for the likes of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (#133) and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (#29). His last album, 2020's Starting Over, is down at #79.

Photo courtesy of Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

Stapleton's bluesy country melancholy matched the rainy Thursday night.

Consistently stunning in his songwriting and studio pairings, Stapleton is in his myth-making era, the soundtrack for heartbreaking or babymaking, splitting the difference between Waylon Jennings and Otis Redding.

He's long crossed that imaginary, arbitrary pop threshold that most country artists find themselves in and went and made songcraft appreciated again. He paved the way for the likes of Zach Bryan and Maggie Rogers to top charts with ragged hearts and found time to collaborate with Justin Timberlake and Joy Oladokun.

Stapleton's big-time intimacy suits RodeoHouston like a well-worn pair of ropers and for his fifth performance since debuting at NRG Stadium in 2017. Opening with "Parachute," Stapleton and his four-piece band – with the legendary Paul Franklin – turned the stadium into the world's most expensive backyard ice house.

He always seems to channel ZZ Top whenever he enters Harris County, and on Thursday night, he was finding ways to interweave Billy Gibbons licks into nearly every song. There was a wink in "Second One To Know," a spiritual callback in "Arkansas," and his beard is pretty ZZ as it gets.

Eight years since its album debut, "Nobody To Blame" is the sound of Stapleton in a lab distilling the history of outlaw country into four minutes, showcasing his guitarwork as it chugs along.

So many people complain about rodeo shows for one nitpicky reason or another when many times, these are the first musical experiences that most kids even undergo. These are the kind of rodeo shows that inspire a kid to tug at their parents' sleeve during the show and ask for a guitar and set someone on a musical journey.

This was my fifth Stapleton show, and even I am pondering hitting up a pawn shop this weekend for a guitar.

"Fire Away" saw the crowd of 72,634 match Stapleton's glow from the stage with the lights from their phones, creating a bed of twinkling cellular stars in the stadium, so much so that even Stapleton seemed overcome by it.

Stapleton and company savored every sip of set closer "Tennessee Whiskey" as the Ford fleet arrived to whisk them off into the night. RodeoHouston books actual musical acts, and Thursday night was a reminder of how magic one of these communal experiences can be.

Setlist

Parachute

Second One To Know

Hard Livin’

Starting Over

Millionaire

Arkansas

You Should Probably Leave

Nobody To Blame

Worry B Gone (Guy Clark cover)

Fire Away

Broken Halos

Tennesse Whiskey

Movie Review

Glen Powell stumbles in remake of sci-fi classic The Running Man

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Glen Powell in The Running Man.

For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.

Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.

Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.

Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.

The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.

Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.

Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.

The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.

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The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14.

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