Inexcusably awful

Rating: 1/10 (25 February 2008)

I'm no film expert/nut/whatever. But I do like good movies and I LOVE good westerns. 90% of the movies I rent are westerns and this is the worst one I've ever seen, hands down. This is my first and perhaps last comment on IMDb, but I just had to say something.
It's easy to pick on just about any western, from the earliest ones thru Leone and late-Eastwood. Let's face it, every western features fantastic silliness on one level or another; many are ridiculous on several levels. Historical inaccuracies, physical impossibilities, absurd caricatures of archetypes, you betcha, westerns have got 'em. I'm more than fine with all these things; handled skillfully, such silliness adds to a good western's appeal.
But in the hands of this guy (i.e., some director of whom I'm too disdainful to even look up his name), we have a movie in which the concept of suspension of disbelief is abused. It is taken by the director to mean carte blanche for him to play in the sandbox of "take this, stupid movie watcher! Look at handsome Russel Crowe! Let me create characters with motives so stupidly incongruous that we shall agree to call them complex. Let me spend millions of somebody else's money on this piece of s*** and call it a feather in my cap when I go begging for millions more to spew forth my next 'oeuvre'."
Watch any other movie but this one. I particularly recommend the original 1957 version of "3:10 to Yuma" if only to wipe away the shame of the movie title that will forever be sullied by this '07 pile of offal.