This movie is a little incomplete, and by that I mean literally; it’s not got all it’s parts pulled together. What could have possibly been a great movie ends up being a decent movie, and barely even that. Really it’s just a movie, neither good nor bad, that has some good stuff to it. If only it had been allowed to reach it’s potential.
Kiefer Sutherland is the wayward son who has come home, carrying a reputation as an effective gunman. His father in the movie is played by his father in real life, Donald Sutherland, and in the movie he’s a bit of a sanctimonious, hard-nosed man. So when his son comes home he expects trouble.
Trouble comes in a couple of different forms, but mostly this is where the trouble for this movie starts to rear it’s head. There’s the classic bad guy causing trouble, but then there’s the hired gun for said bad guy. He and John Henry Clayton (Kiefer Sutherland) seem to have a connection as brothers-of-the-gun, if you will, and are not eager to engage each other in a showdown. But here’s the problem: what looks to be the most promising element of this would-be-moody film gets passed over in order to keep the movie as cookie cutter as the studio bosses see fit.
At the film’s completion I had guessed there must have been a doozy of a pile of film on the cutting room floor, and from what I’ve read, that seems about right. Apparently the original film was timed at around three hours, but the powers-that-be, in all their Hollywood wisdom, decided the movie would be better and an hour and a half, and therefor removed everything that would make the movie interesting. It’s a terrible shame, too, because it looked as if it might have been building up to be a little something in the vein of 1995’s Heat with Deniro and Pacino. Do I think at three hours they would have pulled it off? No, a movie like Heat is a rarity, but a western done in that vein, with the dichotomy of two like rivals could still have been a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, Gentleman Dave Turner (Michael Wincott, the rival gunfighter) pretty much slips out of the movie immediately after his set up, and then returns just enough at the end to look cool.
I really think the writer of this film knows his western stuff, I just think the producers wanted to make the safest formula-film they could. It’s worth a watch, but if anything it’ll probably leave you wandering what was left out that you didn’t get to see.
Handy With A Gun...! 