The Jack Bull

In late-nineteenth-century Wyoming, horse trader Myrl Redding runs afoul of a powerful local landowner, Henry Ballard, who controls passage across his land and demands payment in livestock. When Redding leaves two horses behind as surety, the animals are mistreated and a friend of his is badly hurt. Redding turns to the courts for redress, but the proceedings favor Ballard, and the dispute hardens into a personal conflict that draws in other settlers. What begins as one man's search for justice grows into an armed campaign across the territory.

The Jack Bull is a television Western directed by John Badham, the fourteenth of the fifteen features listed in his filmography, arriving after Nick of Time and before Footsteps. Dick Cusack wrote the screenplay, and Kevin Reidy produced. John Cusack plays Myrl Redding, with John Goodman as Judge Tolliver, L.Q. Jones as Henry Ballard, Miranda Otto as Cora Redding, John Savage as Slater and Rex Linn as Shelby Dykes.

The film drew modest but generally favorable attention. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from roughly 5,900 votes, while on TMDB its score is 6.4 from about 104 votes. Critics rated it 6.8 from five reviews, closely matching the larger IMDb sample and sitting above the smaller TMDB figure. Made as a television production, it runs 116 minutes.