"They Drag Me Back In Again"

Rating: 9/10 (11 July 2009)

Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp must have felt a whole lot like Michael Corleone being brought back into the law business which he thought he'd left behind in Kansas. Of course when you and your brothers settle in a wide open town like Tombstone, Arizona you've got to expect your talents will be called upon.
As long as films are being made, filmmakers will never lose their fascination for the saga of Wyatt Earp that culminated in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881. Kurt Russell join an incredible pantheon of Hollywood's best actors who've gotten a crack at Wyatt Earp, like Henry Fonda, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Burt Lancaster and Tom Mix. However this film bears the closest resemblance to Hour Of The Gun which had James Garner as Wyatt Earp which also showed, in fact it concentrated on what happened after the famous gunfight.
Unlike in Hour Of The Gun where Jason Robards, Jr. as Doc Holliday upbraids Wyatt Earp for becoming a killing machine, nobody's really caring about that here. In fact the tubercular Holliday quite approves of what Russell is doing. He's given plenty of cause after the OK Corral as you'll see.
When he's on the screen Val Kilmer steals the film. In fairness to Russell and the rest who've played Earp, especially as a straight arrow the way Burt Lancaster did Gunfight At The OK Corral, the role of Holliday is such a colorful one, it's an actor's dream. Kirk Douglas walked off with that picture as does Val Kilmer here and Russell isn't quite the straight arrow that Lancaster was.
For the first time the Earp brothers are shown as the family men they were. All but Wyatt were married in fact and Wyatt was keeping company with Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, but he drops her for Dana Delany who in fact he was with for the rest of their lives together and Earp died in 1929.
Robert Mitchum whose unmistakable voice narrates the film was supposed to play Old Man Clanton, but health considerations knocked him out of the part and he only narrated. I'm sure the rewriting also reduced the parts of Ike and Billy Clanton. Another film legend, Charlton Heston, plays rancher Henry Hooker who shelters Wyatt and his posse.
The bad guys who get their due here are Powers Boothe as a vicious Curly Bill Brocius and Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo who's definitely not gambling with the Earps and Doc Holliday with a full deck.
My favorite Wyatt Earp film still remains Hour Of The Gun, but Tombstone which follows and embellishes a lot of the story line of that film is definitely a worthwhile film. I understand according to commentary made during a showing of this on the History Channel, Kurt Russell did a lot of the directing himself.
He and credited director George P. Cosmatos deserve a lot of credit.