At last, the movie that demythologizes Wyatt Earp

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2001)

Wyatt Earp comes to Tombstone to establish a business with his brothers Virgil and Morgan. He's given up law enforcement, he's tired of being poor, and he's reasonably content in his common-law relationship with a laudanum-addicted ex prostitute. He basically wants to get ahead by getting along. So he thinks. Brother Virgil (Sam Elliott at his considerable best) and adventuress Josephine Marcus (slyly seductive Dana Delany) soon pull him into twin maelstroms which force him to confront questions of loyalty, honor, love and happiness -- all questions which Wyatt would just as happily avoid. But he can't dodge them. And so the events of director George Cosmatos' definitive "Tombstone" unfold. Wyatt, as here presented (and in contrast to the usually iconic treatment) is not "the fastest gun in the west." He's good but, as he verifies with Doc Holliday (Val Kylmer in a landmark performance), he probably can't take Johnny Ringo. The 'gunfight at the O.K. Corral,' as here presented (and again in contrast to the usual treatment), is not a climactic resolution; with superb pacing in the circumstances leading up to it, it's depicted -- accurately -- as a vicious 30-second streetfight which nobody wanted, which resolved absolutely nothing, and out of which many of the ensuing events of "Tombstone" take their impetus. Wyatt Earp has come down to us through the years as a larger-than-life icon, both in literature and in movies/TV -- not to mention the tourist industry in present-day Tombstone, AZ, which focuses primarily on those 30 seconds on a chilly October afternoon in 1881. He has been portrayed, alternately, as a stalwart, grim-faced pillar of law enforcement, or as a sham. Director George Cosmatos here chooses to present him, for once, as something infinitely more complex: a human being. And, in a surprisingly well-crafted performance by Kurt Russell, he does it exceedingly well.