Very disappointing...

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Late one night on a desolate road, in an empty saloon Martin Sheen spins a yarn for Robert Carradine of Hopalong Cassidy and friends tracking a group of murderous cattle rustlers, who've killed a few men and kidnapped Cassidy's girl.Writer/director Christopher Coppola May have incurred the wrath of William Boyd purists by daring to make a modern low budget film featuring their beloved Hoppy, but I'm glad he did it! No character should be so tied to an an actor that no one else ever be allowed to play him or her again!I thought it was good fun and an interesting updating of the classic programmers of the thirties and forties. Though guilty of some bad acting, this is earnest enough and unpretentious, making it hard for me to dislike.The whole production is a bit odd though, but I really enjoyed the scenes between Sheen and Carridine. The fact that we're watching a story within a story makes the oddness and exaggerations more palatable.

This is almost certainly the worst Western I've ever seen. The story follows a formula that is especially common to Westerns and martial arts films -- hero learns that family/friends have been murdered, so hero sets out to exact revenge, foils the ineffective lawman, rescues the kidnapped loving damsel, and murders the expert arch-nemesis in a brutal duel. This formula has often been successful -- otherwise it wouldn't be a formula -- but Gunfighter is the most sophomoric execution of it you'll ever see. The scripting is atrociously simple-minded and insulting; it sounds like a high schooler wrote the dialogue because it lacks depth, maturity, and realism. The sound is bad; it sometimes looks dubbed. The cinematography is lame, and the sets are sometimes just facades. The acting is pitiful; sure, some of the performers could blame the script, but others cannot use that excuse. I hope I never see Chris Lybbert in a speaking role ever again; every time he says a line that should be angry or mean, he does nothing more than lower the timbre of his voice and he just sounds like a kid trying to act macho. And speaking of Chris Lybbert, who plays Hopalong, check out his duds (if you dare to watch this film): He wears these brand new clothes that make him look more like Roy Rogers than a hard-working, down-and-dirty cowboy. If you enjoy inane cinematic fare that serves merely to worship the imagined grandeur of Hopalong Cassidy, then get this, but if you have more than two neurons, watch something else.

We saw this on the shelf at the local video store, saw "Coppola" in the credits and got excited. That was the one and only time this movie raised any interest. I could never quite work out if it was an attempt at a humourous film that failed miserably, or an attempt at a serious film that failed miserably. In general, the entire production seemed incredibly amatuerish. The sound in particular was absolutely dreadful, especially in the scenes shot in the little bar; the dialogue was so corny in parts it was unbelievable. Very disappointing.

A dreary and pointless bit of fluff (bloody fluff, but fluff). Badly scripted, with inane and wooden dialogue. You do not care if the characters (indeed, even if the actors themselves) live or die. Little grace or charm, little action, little point to the whole thing. Perhaps some of the set and setting will interest--those gaps between the boards of all the buildings may be true to the way life was lived. The framework encounter is unnecessary and distracting, and the Hoppalong Cassidy character himself is both boring and inept.