Possibly the dumbest story of all time

Rating: 2/10 (1 April 2008)

This movie makes me wonder if Hollywood is testing out the masses. "Lets see how stupid a movie-script we can produce, and still get lots of people to like it?" Well you have to do worse than this. It seems, with a rating of 8.0 after nearly 50k votes here for this movie, that people buy anything nowadays. As long as it has profiled actors, entertaining action and believable costumes.
The story of this stupidity of a movie utterly insults my intelligence.
I should have understood it from the very beginning, when the bandits are to rob a coach. Instead of lying in ambush, and just shoot the people on the wagon (espescially the ones with a gatling-gun!), they all (with the exception of their bad-ass leader who just hang back (!)) ride head on shooting wildly, not hitting anyone. Several of them gets killed. But hey, they have a sharpshooter in the bushes! He take out one of the two operating the gatling-gun. Then the one left swings the gatling-gun away from the huge targets of horses and riders around the wagon to shoot at the sharpshooter far away! Just ridiculous. And it just get worse and worse throughout the movie, till it explodes in such a stupidity it had me groaning in mental pain when the final scene ended.
As another wrote here, western-movies is not about realism. They should not be either. Sure the wild west was a frontier to the wild, with lots of murders and lawlessness, but the gunslingers of modern westerns did not exist as they are portrayed in the movies. They were exaggerated even back then, and the two feathers have now become several hens.
And that is the really silly thing about this movie: The seriousness of it. There is not a hint of humor or irony. It seems I am supposed to feel something for the characters, and believe the story.
I could fill a book of all the why's in this movie. In the end I just wanted the only believable character, the right hand man of the bad-guys leader, to just kill the leader (who had a change of heart and suddenly became a good guy (please!)), the hero and his son. Because of their stupid actions they all would have deserved it!
The only redeeming factor is Ben Foster, playing second in command to the bad-guys. Yes Russel Crowe and Christian Bale do a good job acting as well, its just that their characters actions are totally unbelievable, thus making their performances a waste.
2 stars to Ben Fosters portrayal of Charlie Prince.