An over-hyped all-star b-western *minor spoilers*

Rating: 2/10 (3 September 2007)

*minor spoilers* Seriously, I didn't walk out of the sneak feeling that I'd been cheated out of my money. Thank goodness for small favors. Swindled would be more like it.
We take a handful of bankable stars, an elaborate but highly-derivative plot most evocative of High Noon, wrap it in a big budget and an R-rating, call it gritty and real...
And almost everything except the High Noon reference and the R-rating is fake. And I don't want to disrespect High Noon, which was absolutely landmark cinema, but this movie was the anti-High Noon.
You could not get a more profane and overblown premise in a western. All the bad guys are so bad that every time they do anything it's an automatic atrocity, and everyone in the west just cowers and waits to die. Of course one sad disabled Civil War militia vet decides that he'll bank his family's future and his life upon making sure that the baddest bad guy is delivered to his justice.
I'd love to discuss in depth all the ways that this movie disappointed me, but my review would be thousands of words long. This is not a re-enactment of the real west, this is the figment of some overheated Hollywood scriptwriter's imagination, merged with the marketing wing of the whole condemned exercise.
Go ahead. Waste your money. Open Range was a hundred times more real than this travesty, but just pretend that 19th century handguns carried by bad guys always killed the innocent people that got in the way. Imagine that the Pinkertons were just an overpaid and incompetent security force. Imagine, if you will, that possees were routinely gunned down helplessly while searching for mad killers.
The list is almost endless. If you want clichés, Hollywood distortion of what the real west was like, super-villains that are about one century displaced from Batman, and a thousand other dissonant falsehoods wrapped up in one overheated die-cast saddle drama, you've got it all here.
And it only gets worse. I only give it two stars because for a single viewing it is at least entertaining until you are half an hour or so out of the theater, at least presumably for most folks.
Treating lurid fiction like this fable based upon a Leonard Elmore short story like it is a historically-based true life drama should be treated as a hate crime against both truth and history.