When The West Was Huckleberry.

Rating: 8/10 (22 May 2008)

The *Pulp Fiction* of westerns, with its vivid dialog and firestorm set pieces.
Also, Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer together in one film  and that's a big YUM for the ladies. Russell's and Kilmer's opening scenes establish them as powerhouse masculines, something which this film veritably bleeds with, yet these two tower over every other dusty gunslinger and scenery-chomping henchman.
Russell is Wyatt Earp. We meet him alighting a train and whipping a wrangler across the face with his own whip for beating Earp's horse, growling in a rasp that would make The Clint proud, "Hurts, don't it?"
Kilmer is Doc Holliday. Drawing his guns like proverbial greased lightning in a card game gone sour, then knifing his antagonist and exiting stage right with a fistful of cash and a hard, sexy woman, Kilmer has only begun to amaze us as he takes his character a mighty step further, endowing his Holliday with a pseudo-continental accent of his own nefarious design and an educated panache that we doubt anyone on the frontier could have seriously exhibited WITHOUT being a lightning gun (i.e. he'd be killed in a hot second for being such a dandy). To this day he has never commanded a role so deliciously elitist.
Yes, *Tombstone* is yet another Gunfight at the O.K. Corral  but related in such a way that this fact is peripheral to the characters at the heart of the tale.
Directed by George P. Cosmatos, written by Kevin Jarre, *Tombstone* presents a vision of the frontier as half brutal reality, half snakeskin Hollywood, all guilty pleasure. Ten times more entertaining than that OTHER *Wyatt Earp* - poor Kevin Costner's epic, drawn-out, tedious June 1994 release, coming in a weary second to this film in release date and pure animal fun.
The Earp brothers, Wyatt (Russell), Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), with their three blond wives in tow, arrive in Tombstone, eager to settle in and seek their fortune. Wyatt especially wants to leave behind his bloody rep as a "Kansas lawdog." The frontier has other ideas, crawling as it is with The Cowboys  rowdy, red-sashed troublemaking gunhands who "rule" the vicinity like mobsters; led by Curly Bill (Powers Boothe) and his sidekick, Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), the "deadliest pistolier since Wild Bill."
As the trailer said, "Justice is coming to Tombstone."
Setting themselves up, unwillingly at first, as keepers of the peace, the Earp brothers' fate inexorably leads to the gunfight at the you-know-where, due to The Cowboys refusing to disarm while within town limits, the Earps sensing anarchy in the air and attempting to simply disarm them where they had congregated behind the O.K. Corral.
Because this movie piles on so many entertaining vignettes, the O.K. is the least of our climaxes from Wyatt driving out the Faro dealer (Billy Bob Thornton): "Go ahead, skin it! Skin that smoke wagon and see what happens!"
to the tasty, intelligent, Latin exchange between Holliday and Ringo (you can see the full translation in the 'memorable quotes' link): "Eventus stultorum magister." "In pace requiescat";
this movie roars like a stallion on steel hooves, in a hail of Peacemaker gunfire and very real handlebar moustachios.