There are a lot of small towns out there. A lot of murders. That’s what I’ve learned from my years on this planet watching television shows and movies. Murder is not just limited to New York, although the Law & Order franchise would certainly suggest that crime happens there on a pretty consistent basis. No, sometimes murder breaks out in a small town where there’s a sheriff and a deputy, and not necessarily a whole squad of police officers or different departments scattered across the city. Sometimes there are just a couple of guys responsible for keeping everybody safe from violence. And sometimes, that crime is represented in dull movies like The Deputy.
Directed by Matt Sukkar, with a screenplay by Carlo Bernard based on the novel by Victor Gischler, The Deputy starts with Toby Sawyer, played by Duke Nicholson, who is the titular deputy. Toby is awakened in the middle of the night by Chief Krueger, played by William H. Macy, and told to look after a dead body until the coroner arrives. Seems like a simple task, but it is one Toby manages to botch horribly when the body disappears. Toby is not exactly great at his job, so we get to watch this somewhat average, somewhat bumbling, somewhat incompetent deputy stumble through a plot involving criminals, corruption and the question of what actually happened to the dead guy he was supposed to be guarding. Toby is outmatched in terms of firepower, while also dealing with problems at home and suddenly being saddled with a baby he needs someone else to watch.
Most of the movie consists of Toby bouncing around his small town from business to business and person to person, almost like the movie is treading water waiting for its plot to catch up. There’s a truck full of immigrants that gets pulled into the story, along with various other discoveries that suggest something much bigger is happening around Toby. Stephen Dorff plays Deputy Billy Banks, one of the people pressuring Toby to look the other way, while Macy largely vanishes from the film after establishing the premise. Eventually, Tiffany Haddish arrives as Deputy Amanda Jackson, who isn’t sure whether she can trust Toby or whether he’s part of the problem. By that point, I was pretty certain the biggest reason you could trust Toby was because he wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to be the bad guy.
I hate saying yes to advanced screeners and then not liking the movie, but there was nothing about The Deputy that really grabbed me. Anything I could possibly think of as a positive, or anything that made me want to say yes to the movie in the first place, never really panned out. William H. Macy is an excellent actor and could have been a great reason to watch the film, except he’s barely in it. He’s basically there at the beginning and the end. It reminded me of Russell Crowe in the recent release The Weight with Ethan Hawke, where the recognizable name in the cast might attract viewers, but the actual screen time is rather nominal. In both cases, they bookend the momentum of the film. They do not provide it.
Tiffany Haddish also doesn’t show up until later, and this is one of those performances where she’s trying to play things almost entirely straight instead of bringing the comedic energy people associate with her. I have no problem with Haddish wanting to prove she has dramatic range, but The Deputy doesn’t give her enough to do with it. The film desperately needs somebody to inject a little life into it, and instead Amanda Jackson mostly functions as another piece of the plot. You’ve got William H. Macy, Tiffany Haddish and Stephen Dorff in your cast, and somehow the movie still feels like it is starving for personality.
That leaves an enormous amount of the film resting on Duke Nicholson, who is the grandson of Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson and the nephew of actor Ray Nicholson. That family connection admittedly made me curious. Ray has already popped up in several films and, at least for me, has demonstrated more of the charisma that makes the Nicholson name immediately interesting. Duke has a much more understated, everyman quality here. Honestly, if he had turned down this role, I could imagine it going to somebody like John C. Reilly or Paul Walter Hauser, actors who know how to play these ordinary, slightly hapless guys while still finding something fascinating underneath them. Based solely on this performance, I don’t see that same spark yet with Duke. Maybe another role will unlock something completely different, but The Deputy certainly didn’t convince me that we have another Jack Nicholson emerging from the family tree. If he had a different last name, nothing about this performance would have made me stop and wonder whether he was somehow related to Jack Nicholson.
To be fair, Well Go USA did not provide audio description, which unfortunately is pretty much par for the course with them. I can’t imagine audio description fixing my larger problems with The Deputy, but accessibility remains an issue regardless of whether the movie is good. It’s 2026. We are literally at the point where people are having conversations about artificial intelligence becoming powerful enough to reshape civilization, billionaires have their own space programs, and somehow we’re still having to explain why blind people need audio description and why it should be available on every film regardless of how large or small a distributor thinks it is. Well Go USA is not some company that appeared yesterday. They have been distributing films for years.
I recently screened a movie that was essentially independently distributed, with a much smaller profile than something starring William H. Macy and Tiffany Haddish, and they still managed to provide an English audio description track. Not merely a basic check-the-box track either, but quality audio description. When I see tiny productions clearly stretching every dollar, shooting in limited locations and working with casts without major recognizable names, yet they still find the money to make their films accessible, it becomes harder for me to keep excusing established distributors. Yes, distributors frequently acquire finished films rather than producing them themselves, but at some point accessibility has to become part of the cost of releasing a movie. I don’t understand the predicament anymore. Make the movie accessible.
Still, even if The Deputy had audio description, I don’t think there’s some hidden element that suddenly would have made the film work for me. I’m not sitting here desperately trying to pull out that one thing I loved so I can platform it and say, yes, all these other things were bad, but at least the movie has this. I genuinely cannot think of one thing I particularly enjoyed. The Deputy is too slow for its own good. It meanders too much, its cast is largely underutilized, the story feels too familiar, and there’s no hook or wow factor separating it from countless other small-town crime thrillers.
That doesn’t mean The Deputy is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. There is a difference between mediocrity and something truly atrocious where I’m wondering whether I should smack the remote out of your hand before you can press play. This isn’t that. I didn’t completely want to rip my face off while watching it or Kool-Aid Man my way out of my house just to escape. The Deputy simply needed more. More energy. More personality. A tighter story. Better use of its supporting cast. Something. It’s not one fix. The whole thing needed another pass and somebody willing to bring some life into it.
There is always something awkward about watching an advanced screener and then following it with a rotten review. I don’t enjoy doing that. Somebody gave me an opportunity to see their film early, and now I’m turning around and telling people I didn’t like it. But I still have to do it because honesty is the only thing that makes the good reviews count. In order for me to tell you to watch something, I also have to be willing to tell you when I don’t think something is worth your time. And I don’t think you should watch The Deputy unless, like me, you are incredibly fascinated by the fact that Duke Nicholson is Jack Nicholson’s grandson and you’re chomping at the bit to find out what that looks like on screen. The Deputy is tedious, slow and dull, and it doesn’t feature anything remarkable enough to compensate. While it’s certainly not the worst thing you could watch, there’s also no specific reason why you should.
Rotten: 5.3/10
