The Last Rodeo (2025) Movie Review: A wafer-thin script throws this story of hope off balance

At this point, my anger towards Angel Studio’s blatant propaganda peddling has died down, with the ever-present Christian ideologies slowly slipping into the background instead of being the plot itself. While this is a welcome change, none of their stories have grabbed my attention because they are either poorly mounted or lazily acted. Director Jon Avnet’s “The Last Rodeo,” which is co-written by star Neal McDonough, is both of those things, but the real issue lies in how poorly written the entire thing is.

For starters, the movie assumes that every audience member checking into “The Last Rodeo” knows that Bull riding is a dignified (and/or extremely dangerous) sport down the American southwest. While the target audience can be easily narrowed down to people from most republican towns in the country, the studio and filmmakers’ blatant assumption should be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, they are trying to tell a universal story about hope and human resilience – the least they could do is allow these stories to have some kind of relatable pathos that comes without feeling left out.

Anyway, the film follows Joe Wainright (Neal McDonough), a legendary bull rider who has left the sport for good after he had a fatal accident on the ground, in addition to losing his beloved wife (played by Neal McDonough’s real-life partner Ruvé McDonough in intermittent flashbacks) to a brain tumor. He seems to have recovered from the accident thanks to his dotting, if somewhat angry, daughter Sally (Sarah Jones) and the companionship of his grandson Cody (Graham Harvey). In his free time, he either helps Cody learn how to ride or takes him to his baseball games.

Everything seems to be going well from Wainwright, sans the occasional money troubles, but when Cody is hospitalized, the family learns that he also seems to have a tumor quite similar to his grandma’s, and if he is not operated on right away, it might threaten his life. This thrusts Joe to take on a journey that doesn’t seem all that promising. He decides that he will partake in a bull-riding championship that is going on in Tulsa, which seems to have all previous champions compete against each other for a hefty prize money.

For the rodeo champion, however, he has to take the help of his old acquaintance Charly (Mykelti Williamson), who is used as an archetype, bible-reading companion around Joe’s character, so that he could recite some sermons. The journey also includes convincing Jimmy (Christopher McDonald), the championship organiser, to allow Joe to take part despite him showing up late.

Now, “The Last Rodeo” is a fairly straightforward story with an ending that you can sniff out from the first frame itself. So, to stand out, the only possible way forward should have been to establish these characters and their motifs well. Sadly, director Avnet fails to do exactly that. Except for the dynamics between Joe and his daughter, none of the interpersonal back-and-forth seems all that interesting. Cody’s life-threatening disease is taken as plot motivation and exploited. There are no expositions and no character arcs there to make his state palpable and believable. Even the chemistry between Joe and Charly is dull and haphazardly conceived, with dialogues that are cringeworthy at best.

It goes without saying that Neal McDonough has great screen presence, but with little to no support from the writing front, Joe eventually becomes a character you witness and not journey along with. If you are expecting to witness some intense, rib-cracking sports drama on the rodeo field, you will be severely disappointed as well, because what we have here is a game of death that feels dull at arrival.

I am glad McDonough has had some kind of late career resurgence with his collaborations with Angel Studios, but if the material at hand is so oddly written, even he can’t uplift it.