I've seen a lot of Westerns; grew up on them, and watched the genre evolve over the years from John Ford to Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood and to the postmodern revisionist dreck that now clutters the Hollywood production schedules. The Wild Bunch remains one of my favorite movies. In brief: Edge sucks. Monumental suckdom. Simple as that. Some interesting actors, sure: Max Martini, Bill Sadler, and Yvonne Strahovski though Ryan Kwanten and Beau Knapp are juvenile and subpar, worse than the worse spaghetti Western bit players. But on the whole this movie is violent, vile,senseless, and absurd with awful dialog and a hackneyed plot twist at the end (which I won't reveal and which I advise you not to wait to see). Skip it.

I saw this on Amazon Prime under the title EDGE THE LONER. It's the pilot episode of a would-be western TV series, directed by Shane Black and with a decidedly adult edge: this episode is chock-full of highly stylised combat and bloody battles, with fingers being blown off and bloody squib hits throughout. It makes a refreshing change to the usual sanitised stuff we see on TV.The predictable storyline (about one man's revenge) is the worst thing about this show. However, it makes up for that with Black's strong direction and the well-choreographed nature of the frequent action. The final shoot-out is particularly well handled and enjoyable to watch. Cast-wise, Max Martini (PACIFIC RIM) has little chance to show charisma as the lead, but there are dependables like William Sadler and Ryan Kwanten playing the baddies, so it's not all bad. If this test pilot does get picked up for a full series it has plenty of potential for greatness.

I am rather partial to a Western, and this one actually has a bit of promise to it. It's action packed, has some good dialogue and some convincing performances.Ryan Kwanten is particularly good.But, by golly it's probably the most gratuitously violent programme I've ever seen on TV, and I've seen plenty of violent stuff. Also, very few of the characters are remotely sympathetic - when you feel most sorry for a dog and a horse, then there's something wrong. So, Shane Black and Co may need to modify this one for a full series. I'm unlikely to watch it unless it tones down the series and makes its main character more sympathetic.

There were some positive things about this pilot. It has some of the elements of the classic spaghetti westerns I love, like the nameless gunslinger walking riding into the run down old west town and facing off with the corrupt sheriff and the mission to get revenge for the death of a beloved family member. On paper, this sounded like a great show. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations. It was filled with outlandish, pulpy violence, which is not necessarily a problem, but it seemed out of sync with rest of the show. Too many fingers, toes and heads flew unchecked from various gunshot victims and it just felt silly. The biggest problem I had was the amount of collateral damage for which our protagonist was directly responsible. Granted, he is an anti-hero, but he doesn't seem to have any moral code and seems willing to kill or betray any number of innocent bystanders. They may not all be "innocent", but surely not all deserving of a gruesome death. Even an anti-hero needs to be likable in some way, so that the audience actually wants to root for him. If the villains were not such horrible people, I'd probably be rooting against Edge. If it is picked up to series, I would probably give it one more shot, but I'm not holding out hope.