TV Reivew : Voight Serves Time as ‘Convict Cowboy’

Jon Voight, playing a taciturn, craggy lifer in a Montana prison, brands the Western hide of “Convict Cowboy” with stoical, leathery grit.

The first of a series of original Sunday night movies on Showtime, the movie cleverly mixes rodeos and ranching with a bonding inmate movie.

Shot on location in Calgary, the production, well-directed by Rod Holcomb, looks good, particularly the heaving and bucking bronco sequences on the prison rodeo circuit. Voight, whose career has arched from urban stud in “Midnight Cowboy” to now-genuine wrangler in “Convict Cowboy,” is here the tough loner who protects a young, cocky short-term inmate (Kyle Chandler) in what stereotypically, albeit with some restraint, develops into a virtual father-son relationship.

Notwithstanding an almost obligatory violent villain (a coolly savage prison drug lord effectively portrayed by Stephen McHattie), the originality in Rick Way and Jim Lindsay’s script ranges from a female veterinarian (Marcia Gay Harden) with stymied romantic impulses to the fiercely competitive prison rodeos and the inmate-manned working horse ranch sternly ruled by the gnarled Voight character.

For these selectively chosen cons, the ranch is muddy, hard work but also soft time in a dude ranch setting akin to a prison country club, fostered by an enterprising warden (Ben Gazzara) who’s turned the grassy prison plains into a profitable venture for all.

* “Convict Cowboy” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime