The Worst Film Ever

Just what I expected

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Sam Elliott who is doing his level best to keep the western alive as an American art form stars in The Quick And The Dead which has nothing to do with the film Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Leonardo DiCaprio did. But it has one great western pedigree as the story is from the pen of Louis L'Amour.In fact there are some elements in this story that are most similar to L'Amour's most famous western Hondo. Although Sam Elliott isn't quite the G-rated cowboy John Wayne was.Tom Conti, Kate Capshaw and their son Kenny Morrison are traveling west to settle and work the homestead that Conti's late brother had in Wyoming territory. But they run afoul of some outlaws led by Matt Clark and the outlaws mean to them harm.If you remember in Hondo the mutual attraction of the frontier scout and the settler's wife who is waiting for her husband to get home. That's going on big time here only Conti is very much on the scene. Elliott thinks him a worthless tenderfoot at first, but Conti's character develops over the course of the film and the more you see, the more you realize there's a lot to him. A lot more than there was to Leo Gordon in Hondo.Nice location cinematography in Arizona standing in for Wyoming territory. The roles are well cast and cowboy heroes don't come any better than Sam Elliott.

Sam Elliott tosses a dead antelope in front of Kate Capshaw, then delivers that line with a more or less straight face.Talk about double entendre! It's not the ungulate he's referring to.The main reason for seeing this film is Sam Elliott, one of the sexiest men of the last century. (Why no one did a remake of "The Virginian" with him is beyond my comprehension.) He could be William-Conrad tubby and still be good-looking. Here he's spectacularly thin and angular. I wonder how many hetero men harbor a hankerin' for him.The story is nothing special. All the good people live and the bad people die. The dialog rarely rises above the perfunctory.Westerns are rarely detail-accurate. This one shows something hardly ever seen in Westerns -- a chew stick. After dinner, Elliott chews on one to clean his mouth. On the other hand, one of the bad'uns calls Conti's son a "rug rat", a decidedly late-20th-century term. Capshaw mispronounces "cavalry" but the director doesn't catch it. And I wonder how "Kentucky corn liquor" (which is presumably moonshine) can be brown.Not the worst way to kill 90 minutes -- but hardly a great Western.

I'm amazed that no one really disliked this movie here, in the "user reviews" and the "message board." (Though the two external reviews are tepid.) I was bored out of my mind. The production values were good (scenery, etc.). The actors were notable. The big killer is the story and dialog. Everything is drained out -- from the beginning you see where the story is going, and it never deviates, no surprises or depth.Eight bad guys are after a pioneer settler family (husband, wife, son) making their way west alone on their covered wagon. They follow and menace the family, but peculiarly never really ever catch up. The family is protected by the mysterious stranger (Sam Elliott) who pops up now and then to sprout advice, sage remarks, insults and leers at the wife, Kate Capshaw, who might be a beauty on the lone prairie, but here looks pretty haggard.Avoid this unless you are a fan of the actors and film makers.

This is one terrific western film. Sam Elliott, who is marvelous as a "Shane-like" character, plays a drifter who follows a family of green homesteaders across the western plains and protects them from a savage pack of outlaws. The family, which includes Tom Conti and Kate Capshaw, also becomes more sufficient as the story progresses. It's a lean, well-directed film, with not a scene or character wasted. Not until Unforgiven did a western film arrives as superior as this HBO production. The story is based on an entertaining L. Lamour novel of the same name. The novel has a significant plot twist from the film, which I won't reveal here.