Good start, but then it gets ruined

best movie i've ever seen.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Instead of doing actual writing today I decided to procrastinate and view this 1980s Charles Bronson masterpiece.Here are my two cents...Bronson is a Denver journalist who find him self out for lunch and serial homicide one afternoon. It appears some whackjob lost his gauge on reality and unloaded on an entire Mormon family. Even killing the kids. It does not take a prophet to get the fact no one cares for this .Bronson befriends the Mormon family patriarch and a strange friendship starts. He first tells the man's father who then accuses his own brother. We then hop off to Glenwood Springs , Colorado where the local not so friendly sheriff points Bronson to the farm of the accused brother.After hitching a ride with one of the brothers many cousins , the accused brother accuses the brother who accused him. More back n forth than a washing machine in motion. Bronson doesn't buy it. The tanker truck that suddenly runs them off the road certainly makes the brothers doing it not wash. As Bronson digs deeper he finds the debutante of a very powerful businessman owns the tanker truck company.Back home in New Zion the brother has decided that when it comes to the violent murder of his grand children God can sit judgment out. After organizing his flock he heads to Colorado for a shootout with his brother. Bronsan warns the brother moments before a shootout begins and during the fire fight learns this piece of land has billions of gallons of water under it , that guess what some nearby water company has been dying to get their hands on , even with all the pieces he can't stop both brothers from killing one another .Afterwards , the tanker truck returns with its friends , and demolishes the vehicle Bronson Is leaving in. Back in Denver the chief of police is holding his first fundraiser via his old business partner Fox. After the death of a source and an earlier knife fight with the killer, Bronson comes face to face with the cutthroat again. After a brief struggle we get all the answers.Disclaimer : A Golan - Globas production. That's 80's film speak for B- Rate , but remember without these two you would never know who Chuck Norris is.I have to admit it was a good script no problem with it. The acting could be shaky at times and the direction clearly had a problem with achieving the psychological moods in scenes. There is enough here to pass a Sunday afternoon sometime but not much else.

For something completely different in a Charles Bronson movie, I recommend "Messenge of Death". Gone is a lot of mindless action, being replaced by an intriguing story line involving Mormons, greed, and a "who done it?" Having a good supporting cast, including Daniel Benzali (pre chrome dome), Laurence Luckinbill, and Trish Van Devere helps. Seems someone in Bronson's circle of rich and influential friends instigated a Mormon feud by slaughtering a family including children. As Bronson pieces together a conspiracy to acquire water rights from the Mormons, the movie holds interest. It is only the rushed conclusion that disappoints, leaving plenty of unanswered questions regarding motivation for all the killing?. - MERK

Charles Bronson plays a Denver Tribune crime reporter named Garret Smith who is investigating the circumstances of a massacre in the isolated Mormon community between two feuding brothers, both of whom deny responsibility, though blame the other. Turns out a third party is trying to cause a rift between them, so that their valuable property can be seized. Smith then becomes determined to find out who, even at risk to his own life.Surprisingly different role for Charles Bronson(he does not play the title character!) and he is quite good in it too, clearly enjoying doing something different. It's too bad that the film, while interesting, peters out into such an obvious conspiracy thriller, since it could have instead took a thoughtful look at the Mormon community, rather than having it in the background. Still, one of the better Bronson films from the end of his career.

Well, this doesn't mitigate the sump that Charles Bronson found himself in in the 1980s but at least it's a variation on his them of hard-boiled avenger. Here, he's an investigative reporter for a Denver newspaper. He only fires a gun once, and at an empty coffin. He gets to beat hell out of a scowling would-be assassin -- twice -- but the blood is minimal. He never wrenches off anyone's head with a wisecrack and pees down the neck cavity. That has to be a variation, right? The story is pretty simple. The women of a rural family in Colorado are slaughtered along with half a dozen young children by mysterious visitors. Bronson is on the case. The patriarch, luckily absent at the time of the shootings, leads Bronson to an angry fundamentalist Mormon of the John Brown type -- all bulging eyes, stentorian voice, and over-sized gestures. That would be Jeff Corey. The massacred family was part of Corey's flock. Corey blames his brother, a balding John Ireland, who runs a huge farm nearby. Bronson intervenes when the two feuding families begin to exchange shots but both Corey and Ireland are offed -- not by their opposing clans but by outside snipers on a distant hill. Something like that anyway. Who cares? It made no difference to the screenwriter.Those distant snipers, it turns out, represent the Colorado Water Company. Water is precious in them thar hills. There's plenty of water to drink but far more has to be shipped in at great expense to provide the six barrels of water that the shale company needs to produce one barrel of oil. Ireland's farm is sitting on top of a huge aquifer that would provide all the water for a pittance but Ireland has refused to sell. "This is our land. We live on it. It's our home," and so forth.Well, you see, the Colorado Water Company WANTS that land of Ireland. To them, it's an emerald isle. So someone is trying to start a feud between Corey's clan and Ireland's clan in hopes that, with the land passing into other hands, the Colorado Water Company can buy it up.But who's behind it all? Bronson, through his newspaper, knows some of Denver's elite, including the owners of the Water Company. You can tell they're the elite because, at parties, they wear tuxedos, sip champagne, and nibble canapés instead of wolfing down Rocky Mountain oysters after a shot and a beer. But, although the chief miscreants are somewhere among them, it's hard to tell just who they are. There's the ambitious Chief of Police running for mayor. There's Laurence Luckinbill as a good-natured pal of everybody. And there are the owners of Colorado Water, the husband who gave the company to his wife as a Christmas present, and the pretty wife who seems to know nothing about managing the company.The film is more of a mystery than an action movie, and that's rather refreshing in itself. I mean, imagine, Bronson only slugging a snarling heavy twice and shooting a gun only once. Still there's a nifty scene of Bronson and his colleague, Trish Vandevere, almost being squashed between two eighteen-wheeled tankers. It's a familiar crisis though. I always find myself wondering why the driver of the car doesn't just stop his vehicle and let the two trucks keep going.If you or I were to make a "Charles Bronson Movie", we might do it exactly the way that Golan/Globus did. You begin with a sloppy screenplay that ends with a ludicrous climax. And you hire a director and all the principal actors who are over the hill, just sitting around somewhere in Tonopah, Nevada, living off residuals. They don't have to act, anyway, just say their lines and move along. It doesn't matter if, like Charles Dierkop, the patriarch of the slaughtered family, you can hardly act at all. What difference does it make when you're given nothing but stilted lines that avoid contractions in order to sound some Biblical resonance -- "We did not ask you to come; we do not ask you to stay; it is the Lord's angels who will seek out vengeance." Mormons don't speak like that, not even the polygynous fundamentalists who lived in Short Creek, Arizona, fifty years ago. Nor do they call themselves "Mormons." That's a Gentile appellation. They are LDS to each other. On top of that, Mormon angels don't have wings, unlike those shown in this flick. I suppose the writers avoided setting the story in the location we'd have expected, Appalachia, because the stereotype had become too familiar. So they created a new set of stereotypes.I was glad that the film gave Bronson a chance to wash the gunpowder residue off his hands and that we get to see some of Colorado's magnificently chilly scenery -- but what a sloppy job by all concerned.