The Weight Movie Ending Explained And Full Story: Does Sam Get His Daughter Back? 

“A desperate man is a violent man” says one of the characters in Padraic Mckinley’s historical survival thriller “The Weight.” The film is born out of that very idea, but instead of the typical badass lead who must work his way out of trouble, Mckinley has the ever reliable Ethan Hawke playing a World War 1 veteran whose personal life is in shambles. “The Weight” is based during the time of the Great Depression, and the director really does a commanding job in terms of taking the audience to that time. Even though the expedition through the Oregon wilderness could have been executed better, I’m not mad about how McKinley kept the action subtle either.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the film?

Sam Murphy is a single father raising his little girl, Penny, who looks like she could walk into any horror movie set and she’ll do fine. Jokes aside, Sam really tries his best to keep Penny happy, after she lost her mother. In the opening scene, Sam is pretending to drive fast to evade cops, while Penny is having the time of her life in the backseat. However, the father-daughter duo face a horrible reality check when they return from Church service one day to find out that they’ve been evicted. What’s worse is that their neighbors are moving into their apartment, the same neighbors who’d ask Sam for help over the tiniest things. Since they don’t have enough money, when Mrs. Acers offer to buy the radio that belonged to Sam’s wife, he doesn’t think twice before agreeing. Mrs. Acres’ son eyes the teddy bear Penny is holding, and even though Sam says that’s not for sale, Penny herself gives it up with a heavy heart. While hunting for a new place, Sam finds an apartment close to Penny’s school, but when nobody answers the door, he tries to look for the back door in a narrow alley. But instead of finding a place to live, a number of men confront Sam, accusing him of snooping around. Sam tries to talk to them, but he loses his temper when one of the men tries to scare Penny. A fistfight ensues, and even though Sam had no problem taking on them, one of them turns out to be a cop. He’s wrongfully imprisoned, while Penny is taken away to a Catholic orphanage. Sam finds himself in a labor camp, where the supervisor, Mr. Clancy, assures him and the other convicts that he rewards hard workers without any partiality. 

How does Sam gain Clancy’s trust?

Clancy is a man who loves his baseball, and when he offers his men that they can get a day off to play if they can move a huge boulder, everybody except Sam gets pretty excited. Now the problem is, the group is out of dynamite, and moving such a giant rock manually is a herculean task. Even though Sam wasn’t interested in trying, when Clancy personally asks him to be a team player, he steps up. Sam uses two jacks to slightly lift the massive boulder off the ground, then asks his friends to drill a couple of six-inch-deep holes into its upper surface. They insert some solid and sturdy sticks into the holes, giving them something to push against as they try to move the enormous rock. The crew manage to remove the boulder, and Clancy tips his hat to Sam, since he never imagined this task is even possible. In the coming days, Clancy takes Sam under his wing, from shooting pigeons with him to asking him to fix his 1932 Ford, a car he previously felt couldn’t be fixed. Sam works his magic on the car and gets it running smoothly, and before long, he and Clancy strike up a genuine rapport while sharing stories from their experiences in the Great War. When Sam tells him about how Clancy is up for adoption in a month, while he still has six months of his sentence left, Clancy feels bad for him. The next day, Clancy offers to release Sam before the end of the month, but he needs him to do a job only extremely tough men can pull off. He asks Sam to find three trusted men from his group, so that he could ship them to Oregon, where they have a special assignment waiting for them. If they succeed, not only all four men get to go home to their families, but also earn themselves a pretty penny. Sam chooses the men he shares his quarter with; Singh, Rankin, and Olson. Singh is a brown socialist who was imprisoned for leading a protest, while Olson is a hardworking, soft-spoken chap who ended up trying to hang a local judge after the man unfairly took his family’s farm away. We don’t know how Rankin ended up in jail, but he’s the comedian of the group, who has no filters in his mouth and he keeps annoying the rest of them. 

Who is following Sam’s group? 

Sam and his friends are taken to the Black Hawk Gold Mine, Oregon, where they meet George Taggart. This man runs the gold mine, and he’s growing paranoid that the miners might get greedy and steal the gold from the government. President Roosevelt has issued an executive order requiring all the gold mines across the country to declare how much gold they have, allowing the Federal government to confiscate it. Two mines have already been looted by the workers, and Taggart is worried about the same happening to this mine, under his nose. So Taggart fills several backpacks with gold bricks, and asks these four men to secretly carry them across the dense and tropical wilderness, and meet him where the road connects again. The journey will take approximately six days, and Taggart sends two armed men, Amos and Letender, to keep watch on them. Taggart warns Sam that even if they turn up with one less brick than they’re given, they’ll face horrible consequences. At the crack of dawn, the men sneak out of the mine with their gold filled backpacks, and begin their journey. But within a few minutes, Sam’s military instincts kick in, and he can sense that there’s somebody following them. He asks Letender to give him a knife, and then tracks down the stalker. The stalker, Anna, turns out to be an Indian servant from the mines, Anna, who just followed these men because she needed to get out of there. Despite everyone asking her to go back, she threatens to reveal the secrets hidden inside their backpacks, leaving them with no choice but to unanimously agree to take her along.

What hurdles does Sam face in the forest?

The men don’t run into much trouble on the first day of their trip, but the silence between them while carrying such heavy backpacks does take a heavy toll on them. So Singh and Olsen narrate how they got arrested, thanks to Rankin buzzing in their ears constantly to do so. But the first real task appears to be crossing a frail wooden bridge, which already looks worn out and dangerous to cross. When Amos brags about how well-built the wooden bridge must be, one of the planks suddenly breaks beneath him, nearly sending him hundreds of feet below. Since the bridge clearly can’t hold up all these men carrying such heavy weight, Sam asks half of them to cross without the bags. He then stands right in the centre of the fragile bridge, while Singh and Rankin throw him one brick at a time, which he carries and tosses to the other end. He cannot afford to miss a single catch, if he loses even one brick, this mission is done for. After doing this for so long while maintaining balance, Sam gets exhausted and his head starts buzzing. He asks Rankin to wait before he throws the last brick at him, but the man is somewhat of a buffoon, and he throws it anyway. Sam risks his life trying to catch it despite the brain fog, and all Rankin can do is apologize. The same night, while Anna cooks for the men, a strange man comes to their camp looking for food. Even though they offer him a meal, the man starts getting nosy and asks them about what they’re carrying in their backpacks. Letender loses his calm, and threatens to kill him, but Amos asks him to back down. The man leaves without causing further trouble, but Sam knows that their mission might’ve been compromised. Sam realises that he might have been an old miner, and their kind kill for scraps, so there’s no way that he won’t come back looking to loot the treasure they’re carrying. 

Who killed Olson?

Worried about the strange man following them, Sam asks everyone to cross the river to change their trail. Crossing the river is no joke, as everybody struggles to even put a step forward. As Rankin struggles to cross, a bunch of wooden logs come floating towards them, while he still can’t untie himself from the rope around him, which is tied to his backpack. Sam rushes to save him, but as soon as he frees Rankin, the ungrateful man completely forgets about Sam and pushes him into the water while scrambling his way out. One of Sam’s feet gets stuck between two rocks, and he can’t even come out of the water to breathe, as the wooden logs are now piled on top of him, acting as a barrier between him and the open air. Anna takes matters into her own hands, as she dunks her face into the water and gives Sam mouth to mouth resuscitation to help him breathe. With Anna’s help at the right time, Sam manages to make it out, and he immediately goes after Rankin. Sam punches him in the face several times, but he dodges one of Sam’s punches, causing Sam to hit the rock beneath him and break his hand. With his fingers swollen and his wedding ring causing him even more pain, Anna once again comes to Sam’s rescue. She threads a needle through the flesh of his ring finger, loops the thread around the ring, and slowly pulls it out over his swollen finger. The next morning, while Singh is cleaning himself up by the river, he notices a couple of empty boats, and immediately warns the others. Sam figures that it must be the strange man and his friends, and with two boats, they surely outnumber his group. He decides their best shot is stealing the boats and escaping through the river, and while everyone starts to load up the boats, the strange man and his friends emerge from the woods. All these men are equipped with guns, and Amos and Letender barely manage to give the others enough cover. Poor Olson gets shot in this mess, and even though the group manages to sail away, Olson loses a lot of blood. Sam checks up on Olson, and the only good news is that the bullet went through, so he straps a tourniquet to stop the blood loss. 

Anna asks Sam to rub a herb paste on her back, since the shotgun pellets the miners fired at them bruised half her back. She tells Sam that just like his daughter, she too, grew up in a catholic home, where they were teaching her how to be a good servant for Anglo homes. But Anna was never meant to be a caged bird, and she ran away before they could ship her off to some rich family. That same night, with rain pouring down and lightning cracking in the distance, Letender and Amos overpower Olson and suffocate him to death in the pitch-black darkness. Rankin was sleeping beside Olson, and he tells Sam that he saw those two men over Olson and it didn’t look right. Sam refuses to act hastily, and asks Amos if he checked up on Olson before he died. Amos lies with a poker face on, saying that Olson was trying to say something, so he leaned closer to him, but since he couldn’t figure anything out, he went back to sleep. Sam knows very well that he’s lying, but he keeps his anger suppressed, since he couldn’t risk his own life with his little daughter waiting for him once this journey ends. 

How does Sam kill Taggart? 

The group finally make it to the dropoff point, where Taggart is supposed to meet them next morning. Anna had stolen a top-shelf bottle of whiskey from Taggart’s office, and the men couldn’t be happier. After drinking like it’s his last day on the planet, Letender gets really wasted, and asks Anna to come with him to be his mistress who can cook for him and warm his bed. Anna chooses to be gracious and subtly insults his manhood, which rubs Letender the wrong way. The next morning, Sam wakes up to Anna screaming for help, and Letender is trying to kill her. Sam tries to stop him, but with a broken hand and the inhuman exhaustion he’s endured over the past few days, he’s no match for the gigantic Letender. It looks like the giant will punch him to death, but Anna stabs Letender from behind, and even that isn’t enough to stop him. Rankin, for the first time in the whole film, comes in clutch, wrapping a wire around the giant man’s neck and choking him, while Anna sees the opportunity and picks up a stone, bashing his skull until the life leaves his body.

By now, these three people have realised that Taggart has instructed his men to kill them once the job is done, so they plan to sabotage the master. Taggart arrives at the location to find Amos and Singh sleeping, still knocked out thanks to the exquisite whiskey. He bullies them to get up, and he’s pretty mad about the rest of the unaccounted men. Singh quickly loads the bags of gold in Taggart’s car, and Sam confronts him head on. Sam has already told Anna and Rankin to hide in the woods, and he asks Rankin to give them a bonus. Amos starts shooting at him, and while Sam dodges the bullets and takes cover, Taggart starts his car and runs away. It doesn’t take long for Sam to blow Amos’ head off. The man was already suffering from a terrible hangover, and what better cure is there than a bullet? Now Sam has to catch Taggart before he disappears with the gold, so he starts running after his car. Conveniently enough, Sam finds another car which was coming his way, and I’m assuming he bullies the driver into giving him the car. But Sam is utterly frustrated since the car is governed by a speed limiter and won’t go past 35 mph. He stops, eliminates the mechanism that was making the car slow, and turns into Max Verstappen driving in Sao Paolo. As soon as Sam catches up to Taggart, he rams his car into Taggart’s, forcing it off the road and sending it tumbling downhill. 

Does Sam Get His Daughter Back? 

A few days later, Sam shows up on Clancy’s front porch. Clancy isn’t surprised to see him, but he does ask about Taggart’s whereabouts. Rankin and Singh catch Clancy off-guard, and they hold a gun against his back. Sam knows that Amos had the same sort of gun Clancy had hanging on his cabin, so it’s not hard to assume that he was in on Taggart’s plan all along. But Clancy warns them that the gold they stole from Taggart belongs to the government, and they don’t want to be tied to it. On top of that, by now he’s figured that Sam and his group must’ve killed Taggart as well, so he uses the murder as a negotiation tactic as well. So Clancy asks Sam to give him all the gold, and all he can offer in return is their freedom. But Sam is no fool, as he knows very well how to cover his tracks. Even though a huge quantity of gold is missing, the man whose job was to protect it, Taggart, is also missing. Sam has hidden his body somewhere in the wilderness, impossible to track down in those days. Even though he holds all the power against Clancy, Sam still shows generosity and tells him that everyone present in the room will split the gold equally, and he’ll sign the release papers like he promised. But in exchange of sparing his life, Sam takes a bit of extra bacon from him, his classic Ford that he fixed earlier in the film. Sam, Anna, Singh, and Rankin leave Clancy’s office as free people, with a hefty sum of money in their pockets. In the end, Sam visits Mrs Acres, and buys Penny’s teddy bear back from her. We see the father and daughter reunited at last, driving off into the sunset in their brand-new car, leaving their troubles behind and riding towards a life where money is no longer something they have to worry about.

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