Jane Got a Gun is a 2015 American Western film directed by Gavin O'Connor and written by Brian Duffield, Joel Edgerton, and Anthony Tambakis.
The film stars Natalie Portman, Edgerton, Noah Emmerich, Rodrigo Santoro, Boyd Holbrook and Ewan McGregor.
After a long period of production issues since 2012, involving director and casting changes, principal photography began on March 21, 2013.
She then rides to the home of a neighbor and former fiance, Dan Frost, and asks him to help her protect her family from the Bishop Boys.
Jane claims that she hasn't seen Hammond in years, but the man recognizes the gun she is carrying as Ham's and demands that she take him back to her house.
Dan digs a shallow trench in Jane's front yard, and they fill it with jars containing kerosene, nails and pieces of glass.
When Dan did not return or write, she assumed he was dead, and life in Jane's war-torn town had become so wretched that she decided to take her daughter Mary and move West on the Bishop wagon train.
Duffield's script appeared on the 2011 edition of the Black List, an annual survey of the most popular unproduced screenplays by development executives.
[7] In May 2012, it was announced that Natalie Portman would star in the film as the title character Jane Hammond and that Lynne Ramsay would direct.
[11] On March 11, 2013, it was revealed that Fassbender left the film due to scheduling conflicts with X-Men: Days of Future Past.
[16] Edgerton and Anthony Tambakis, co-screenwriter of O'Connor's previous film Warrior, were then hired to rewrite Duffield's script.
[18] On April 10, 2013, it was announced that Noah Emmerich had been cast in the final lead role of Bill Hammond, Jane's husband.
The site's consensus reads: "Jane Got a Gun flounders between campy Western and hard-hitting revisionist take on the genre, leaving Natalie Portman's committed performance stranded in the dust.
[39] Joe Leydon of Variety called the film "a solidly-made and conventionally-satisfying Western," and wrote: "For those who have perused the countless accounts of last-minute cast changes, musical directors' chairs and repeatedly-delayed release dates, it may be difficult to objectively judge what actually appears on screen here without being distracted by thoughts of what could have been, or should have been.
"[40] Michael Rechtshaffen of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Jane Got A Gun may not have reinvented the wagon wheel, but it rolls out as a sturdy, well-crafted genre piece despite its rocky road to the screen.
"[41] Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Filming on location in New Mexico, O'Connor and his team make strong use of the stark and sometimes-breathtaking exteriors, even if the drama is often confined to the Hammond homestead.
Other tech contributions are solid, though this is a film whose production history may ultimately prove more memorable than what's been produced: In Jane Got a Gun, the real bullets were the ones fired behind the camera."
Mintzer also said: "A handful of plot twists are not enough to compensate for an overtly heavy, often dreary affair that rides straight into the final standoff with little elegance and a wagon train of pathos.
"[42] Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Since the film's last-minute rewrites, casting switcheroos, and musical chairs behind the camera are irrelevant to the actual quality of the movie, I'll avoid rehashing them here, save to say that the disarray shows on screen.