Almost great

Rating: 8/10 (25 April 2011)

"Tombstone", a big-budget retelling/re-imagining of the legendary Wyatt Earp complete with the shootout at the OK Corral, is mostly an homage to the classic westerns of the 1950s and 1960s. And that's fine, they were cinema at its most fun, and it's always a pleasure to see their themes rehashed with a big budget, an updated script and more modern production quality. "Tombstone" mostly succeeds, with Russel's Earp approachable and enjoyable as he does battle with bad guys, despite seemingly wanting to just make a few bucks, after his arrival in boomtown Tombstone. The movie is full of great action scenes, mostly memorable characters (western clichés, to be sure, but longingly depicted and well-drawn ones).
It's fun in the way the classic westerns were fun. If you like the genre there's really no reason not to pick up "Tombstone". However, this is a movie that seems to have had so many things going for it that it could have been that great movie that manages to capture all of the electricity of the western and distill it into one single, amazing film. So many movies came close, but "Tombstone" unfortunately falls short. The main problem is the sprawling cast of characters which populate the story, so many, and apparently so edited, that characters do things that aren't properly explained and that many seemingly important characters appear sporadically that I found myself asking "Well where have you been?" when some of them appeared after a few dozen scenes of absence.
So it's not perfect. It's still a great western.