Completely unbelievable storyline ruins it for me

Rating: 3/10 (6 January 2011)

I love great authentic-feeling westerns but this is not one of them.
Too many plot holes, an idiotic main character who can't decide if he is good or bad, tons of totally unbelievable action scenes, lack of tension or suspense and a missing true purpose or thread - this sums it up.
The final scene where Wade kills all his dumbfounded and devoted followers, who have spent the entire movie trying to free him, should win an award for the most anti-climactic and illogical ending in any movie.
The Gatling-gun opening scene already set the tone for realism in this soap opera: despite a solid wall of pursuing bandits on horseback, not a single horse is hit by the hail of bullets fired from the stagecoach. The dynamite in the air shooting scene later in the movie is just as realistic.
The tension is non-existent and the characters are not believable, so it failed to draw me in and that is a fatal flaw in a movie. No magic left, just an empty display of video action running before my eyes.
While the actors performed quite well and the technical aspects of the filming were good, a bad script just makes the rest pointless. My score of 3 stars reflects the fact that the movie failed to tell a compelling story.
Tombstone, Open Range and Unforgiven are recent westerns that I rate 8-10 stars for comparison.