A western with style and atmosphere

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 1999)

What were the full time critics on about? This is a really good picture, full of interesting characters and blessed with some clever scripting by a writer who has studied the period. When will the people in the film industry realise that films should be entertaining. Give me a film like this over Costners Wyatt any day. Set piece encounters abound and are original. I can't remember any other film where gunfighters square off by quoting Latin at each other. Or where some cracker barrel philosophy is so well done. The whole enterprise reeks of the atmosphere of the old west. Kurt Russell makes a good Earp and even looks like the real man. For a change, the two Earp brothers have life breathed into them by the actors and Val Kilmer puts in an excellent performance as Doc Holliday. This is not a perfect film though. The romance between Wyatt and the actress fails dismally to interest (maybe some of it was lost on the cutting room floor) and the events following the Earps departure from Tombstone are rushed and patchy as if the film was finished in a rush. What is left is still a good picture! Wyatts slow despair, Doc's plummy language, Johnny Ringos soulless killer, the reckless Curly Bill and the music. Bruce Broughtons score is a pleasure to listen to and progresses with the storyline. Although one very good piece of music is thrown away on the Earps arrival/departure vis Tombstone, Wyatts theme develops slowly as the luckless man is drawn inevitably toward the very destiny he fears and despises. Finally, the theme blares forth in all its tragic splendour as a now lonely figure of Wyatt Earp stands alone in the midst of the carnage of the OK Corral, outlined against a western sky where even the clouds draw attention to him. Great! The relationship between the two killers Holliday and Ringo is excellent, with a slightly unsettled Ringo trying to handle the fact that he is being stalked "Let's play for blood!". If more westerns had been like this the genre would not be unpopular today.