For a generation, James Van Der Beek had one face. He was Dawson Leery, the earnest teenager at the center of Dawson's Creek, forehead always creased with feeling, forever a beat away from a heartfelt speech. That image trailed him for twenty-five years, even through a knowing stretch where he played a spoiled version of himself for laughs. So there is something quietly startling about the last thing he ever filmed asking him to be the exact opposite of all that. In The Gates, now on Prime Video after a theatrical run in March, he plays a predator.
The movie around him is a blunt instrument, and most critics said as much. It carries a 48 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the reviews land on the same word again and again: shaky. The premise is sturdy enough. Three young Black men (Mason Gooding, Algee Smith, Keith Powers) take a wrong turn into a walled community looking for a way home, cannot work the exit gate, and knock on a door for help at the worst possible moment. They see something they were never meant to see. What follows is a hunt, and the film handles it with more force than finesse. Metacritic lands at 44, and the picture arrives on Prime after only a brief theatrical run, which gives it a second life it might not have earned on its own. The streaming numbers suggest most of the curiosity is aimed at one thing: the last performance.
The Pastor
Jacob rules his gated community like a private kingdom, a charismatic pastor who has convinced everyone inside that he is building a Christian utopia. Van Der Beek plays him as a man who never raises his voice, because he has never needed to. The same warmth that once made Dawson so easy to like is here turned into a tool, a smile you learn to flinch from. He gaslights his own congregation into helping him hunt the witnesses, and the horror is not in what he does with a rifle but in how reasonable he sounds while doing it. Critics who shrugged at the film reached for him anyway. The review on Roger Ebert's site put it plainly, calling him the thing that keeps a shaky picture watchable. This is the rare charge of an actor cast sharply against type, and the film is smart enough to make it the whole show.
What raises the material slightly is an idea buried under the noise. Jacob barely has to do the hunting himself. He has spent years training this community to guard its own image, so when three outsiders become a problem, the neighbors take up much of the work on their own, out of loyalty, out of fear, out of the unspoken arithmetic of who is presumed to belong. The most telling gate in the film is the one inside each resident, the boundary they police in their own heads. The film says this more often than it shows it, which is part of why it feels shaky, but the thought underneath is a sharp one, and Van Der Beek's Jacob is its ideal delivery system. That is the unsettling part. He looks like the man everyone has already agreed to trust.
The Weight It Carries Now
The timing is impossible to set aside. Van Der Beek finished shooting this in Owasso, Oklahoma, in late September 2024. Two months later, he told the public he had been diagnosed with stage III colorectal cancer. He died on February 11, 2026, at forty-eight, weeks before the film reached most theaters. So his final performance is a man hiding rot behind a benevolent face, filmed while he privately carried news he had not yet shared with the world. I do not want to over-read that. An actor's job is to disappear into a part, not to leak his own life through it. But it is hard to watch the stillness he gives Jacob, that unhurried calm, and not think about what composure under that kind of pressure actually asks of a person. He turns up once more after this, posthumously, in the Prime series Elle, though The Gates is the last film he carried on his own.
None of this makes The Gates a good movie. It is a modest thriller that reaches for the racial charge of sharper films and mostly grabs air, and no amount of goodwill for its star changes that. What it does have is a real performance at its center, a single lead dragging a film up above its material, the kind that makes you reconsider an actor you thought you had filed away decades ago. Van Der Beek was never handed many roles like this, villains asked to be quiet and frightening rather than earnest. On the evidence here, he could have carried a shelf of them. That is the small, sad thing the film leaves behind: not a fitting farewell, but a glimpse of range we mostly never thought to ask him for.