Purely Joyful Movie!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

It's the late 1800s, and Matthew Quigley is looking for excitement and finds it in a job down under, in Australia. Starring Tom Selleck as Quigley, he brings the American West to the outback.Along the way, he meets Crazy Cora, played by Laura San Giacomo (later famous for Just Shoot Me with David Spade), a woman who mistakes him for her husband. Also, Alan Rickman stars as the unethical Aussie rancher, Elliot Marston, who hires, then quickly fires Quigley.The story was great, as well as the acting from Selleck and Rickman. Also, great direction from Simon Wincer (of Lonesome Dove fame). Truly a wonderful film for fans of Selleck or westerns.

Alan Rickman, a British actor of considerable talent, was so effective as the toothy, treacherous villain in "Die Hard" that he gets to play the same role here. This time he owns a huge ranch in Australia, has convict laborers, a gang of henchman, and bothersome Australian Aborigines who butcher an occasional cow. They're savages all right, just like the Comanche, but they're smart enough to stay just out of rifle range.Rickman is clever. None of these sneering, ruthless villains is ever truly stupid. He hires Matt Quigley, Tom Selleck, as an exterminator, although Selleck didn't know what the job entails. Selleck simply is the best long-distance shooter in the world and has a long, heavy, modified Sharps carbine to prove it. Why, with his supercharged cartridges and his complicated sighting mechanism, he can shoot holes in objects that are so far away that they're beyond the curve of the horizon.But when Rickman reveals the mission for which Selleck was hired -- namely killing every black man, woman, and child in sight -- he wordlessly scowls and throws Rickman through the dining room window. Now, Selleck is an engaging, lightweight actor, but this part -- the taciturn man of principle with unimaginable skills -- belongs to John Wayne.Rickman has his goons beat hell out of Selleck. They throw in a beating for Laura San Giacomo, who is there only to prove that Selleck is heterosexual. The two unconscious good people are taken by wagon a day's drive from the ranch and dumped to starve and die of thirst. The last of the two ruffians who have transported San Giacomo and Selleck makes the mistake of getting too close to Tom and bringing that big Sharps rifle. One hooligan down, by force of hidden knife. The other takes off at full speed in the wagon, while Selleck spends an agonizing minute or two getting himself together, loading the rifle, taking aim, almost passing out, and finally firing at a target so far away that it shimmers in the heat, like Omar Sheriff riding out the desert on his camel. Does Selleck hit his mark? Right through the head.There follows a drawn-out intermittent battle between Selleck and the girl, on the one hand, and Rickman and his snarling gang on the other. At one point, Selleck and San Giacomo fall exhausted into the dust, dying. They are rescued by Aborigines who apparently have the same spiritual healing power as the American Indians.The Aborigines have made Selleck and his rifle into an icon because he's protecting them from the predations of Rickman's men. Knowing this, Rickman baits a trap for Selleck by herding dozens of Aborigines to the edge of a cliff and kicking them off to their deaths, in hopes that Selleck will show up to rescue them. I realize this is so brutal that it sounds like a contrivance but it isn't. Check the fate of the aborigines in Tasmania, the ones who didn't survive to be kidnapped and transplanted to Flinder's Island, the ones who were rounded up and shot like animals in an attempt to exterminate them.Well -- why go on. I always get a kick out of a story about a man with almost superhuman skills. I identify with him because I have so many superhuman skills myself. And when Selleck's rocket-powered bullets hit those distant targets, there is a loud WHAP, the victim is yanked from his horse, and is dead before he hits the ground. Of course the bad guys do a lot of shooting too but they always miss.I don't think I need to tell you how it ends. Guess.

I thought "Quigley Down Under" was a pretty decent western. I certainly wouldn't say it's the best western I've ever seen, far from it, but it's a pretty entertaining movie for the most part.I appreciated the attempt to go a different way than most westerns do, and set the film somewhere other than the American Southwest. I thought having the film take place in Australia was a nice change of pace, and certainly something you don't see in most movies of this type.I thought the actors all did a pretty good job in this movie. Tom Selleck actually plays a decent cowboy! Although, he sometimes looks a little strange sitting on the back of the horse because of how tall he is. It makes me wonder just how big of horse they had to find to be able to accommodate his height.The main problem I had with the movie was the character of Quigley himself. He's just a little too perfect, in my opinion. He's far from the regular rugged cowboy we see in most films, which I guess could be a reason to like him, but he's almost "too good". He may have a somewhat gruff exterior, but he's probably one of the more selfless movie cowboys you could ever hope to find. Also, he's just a little too good at what he does. He's never beaten in a physical confrontation, unless he's severely outnumbered. No one can shoot farther or draw their guns quicker than he can, either.I feel that it was inevitable that Tom Selleck's character would be able to defeat Alan Rickman's. They portrayed Quigley in such a light where I had no doubt what was going to happen in the end. I feel they should've built Rickman's character up more so that he seemed like a more worthy opponent for Quigley. I don't think it was Rickman's fault, either. I think it was the script because Rickman certainly seemed a worthy adversary for Bruce Willis' John McClane in "Die Hard".Take the movie "Unforgiven" for example...here you've got a character played by Clint Eastwood, one of the greatest movie cowboys of all-time, and his character as badass as he was, still had limitations. He wasn't the Superman that Quigley always seemed to be, but despite his limitations, I hold no reservations in saying I prefer Eastwood's Bill Munny a million times more than Selleck's Quigley. I know these were two completely different types of western. "Unforgiven" was dark and gritty while "Quigley Down Under" was just sort of a more light-hearted western, but I still feel the comparison is relevant, in that, even in lighter-hearted films, it's still OK for a character to make mistakes, and not always act in other's best interests before his own.Overall, I'd say it's worth giving "Quigley Down Under" a watch. It's still a pretty decent show, but just keep in mind that it's no "Unforgiven" or "Tombstone". If you go into the movie with that kind of expectation, you'll be disappointed. However, if you can see the movie for what it is, I think you'll enjoy it.

The sad thing about Quigley Down Under is that had this been done thirty years earlier the film would have warranted a major release the way a John Wayne or a James Stewart western would have had. Personally when I look at Tom Selleck and the way he plays the title character, I think James Garner. Selleck plays Matthew Quigley in the same dry, laconic manner that Garner patented.This western is about as southwest as you can get without dealing with penguins and icebergs. Selleck has come to western Australia in answer to an advertisement by a local rancher requiring a skilled marksman with a rifle. He takes the three month voyage from San Francisco and arrives at Alan Rickman's local Ponderosa. Remember this is Australia, a place settled by convict labor. On Rickman's spread it's mostly Scotch and Irish. But Rickman's problem isn't with them, it's with the aborigines.Which brings us to why he wants Selleck's services with a long rifle. Essentially he wants Selleck to hunt them down and kill them at a distance, a bit of ethnic cleansing. Fighting Indians was up close and personal at times. But just shooting people down like game, rubs Selleck the wrong way. He tells Rickman no with vigor. And that vigorous no gets Selleck and Laura San Giacomo a woman not playing with a full deck beaten up and thrown out in the outback with no means of survival. Of course they survive and we learn a lot about San Giacomo. The reason for her insanity, it's more of a defense mechanism to keep out the world, because she's done something terrible that her conscience won't leave alone. It's a beautiful performance, probably the acting highlight of Quigley Down Under.Of course there's plenty of action to satisfy any western fan on any continent. Alan Rickman is an especially loathsome villain, he makes his Sheriff of Nottingham in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood film look like a Girl Scout.And the aborigines do learn to appreciate Selleck and the payback he exacts. They come through for him at critical times in the film.Tom Selleck is a perfectly cast western hero, the kind I used to spend Saturday afternoon's watching.