Amazingly, worse than Costners' movie

Rating: 4/10 (2 January 2010)

Wyatt Earp, the hero of the famous shootout at the OK Corrall, is a fascinating character, who lived through the wildest days of the west and eventually became a friend to the actors who played him in the early westerns. The shootout itself (and Earp's subsequent trial for murder) can be seen as the story of a impudent but sorely provoked law man who was nearly stitched up by a corrupt establishment, but there's also a more interesting interpretation: that in Tombstone, many men (Earp and his brothers included) fought in defence of their own business interests; and that jobs such as sheriff or deputy (held by the Earps) or prosecuting authority (controlled by their enemies) had nothing to do with any true concept of law. I've recently seen two of the many films made about Earp's life (in fact, two films made within a year of each other in the early 1990s); but sadly, neither is particularly good. Kevin Costner even managed the unlikely feat of making Earp's life seem dull, through a leaden determination to play him as a man of frankly preposterous moral resolution. In George Cosmatos's 'Tombstone', Earp is a little less noble - but the film is clearly the worse of the two. The gist of the plot (which drops much of the interesting truth) is that Earp is a bland would-be businessman lacking even the gumption to fall in love, but when people start shooting at him for no good reason, he responds by riding around Arizona personally delivering justice to the state's leading criminals. If I hadn't known the story beforehand, I doubt it would have made any sense to me. One feature of both films is that they make play of the character of Doc Holliday, one of Earp's sidekicks; I found Dennis Quaid's take (in Costner's film) a more rounded performance than Val Kilmer's in this one (though the implausible script is more to blame than the actor).
The film starts with a portrayal of a random murder just to let the audience know that the bad guys are really bad; and unfortunately, that's about as subtle as it gets. I'm sure there is an interesting, ambiguous version of the life of Earp of his comrades to be told; but I certainly didn't find it here.