The Quick and the Dead (1995, Sam Raimi) (Patreon)

52/100

Seems as if some wires got crossed here. Screenwriter Simon Moore, of Traffik fame, takes his high-concept premise quite seriously, at least when it comes to the four main characters and their respective personal crises; the film keeps striving for genuine pathos, and the necessary elements are all in place...on paper. Raimi, however, clearly wanted to make something broadly mythic, and was not of a mind to holster his more garish cinematic weapons for dignity's sake. So we get a stylized neo-Western that's equal parts delirious hoot and grim death spiral, but not terribly satisfying in either respect. Unfair to render judgment without reading the shooting script, perhaps, but I suspect that Raimi, more than Moore, had the right idea—the gunslinger single-elimination tournament is too silly an idea to support even the hoariest melodrama, and would have been ideally served by a superhuman badass in the Mifune/Eastwood vein (in which case Raimi's camera tricks would hardly be a distraction). Stone initially appears to embody just that, and looks reasonably convincing; her range is limited, but, then, so is Eastwood's, and it's certainly not her fault that I kept imagining how much more effective Charlize Theron would be today (a thought I'd previously had re: Cameron Diaz's role in The Counselor). As "lady" gradually reveals her emotional vulnerability—both a reticence to kill and a fear of being killed—she's diminished rather than deepened or complicated, because Stone lacks the chops and Raimi's formal approach actively works against her. What should be a rip-roarin' distaff Yojimbo riff goes soggy. 

Parts of it are still fun, though. While few things make me feel quite as old as does being reminded that DiCaprio was once, in my living memory, this young, he turns in the movie's finest performance, all cocky grin and desperate swagger; the whole illegitimate-son thing falls flat (mostly due to the inherent absurdity of hashing that out via quick-draw duel: "I will earn your respect by murdering you with superior reflexes" vs. "Let me show I care by offering you a chance to chicken out in front of everyone here assembled"), but DiCaprio wisely just channels it into additional bravado. Hackman's mostly doing Little Bill again, with some (non-literal) mustache twirling thrown in, but one gets very nostalgic for his relaxed authority after 17 years of its absence. (19 if you didn’t see Runaway Jury; only 16 if you for some reason did see Welcome to Mooseport.) Crowe, uncharacteristically, never really finds a character—pacifism disarms him, I'm guessing—and just sorta looks vaguely bewildered throughout, as if uncertain how he got (literally) roped into playing someone so passive. And of course Raimi does his exuberant thing, adapted for the genre: frantically zooming into Leone-style close-ups, crafting split-diopter shots from unconventional angles. Hard to get bored. I did frankly resent the film's apparent belief that we might just maybe actually possibly fall for one of the most obvious narrative fakeouts ever attempted, which threatened to end things on a sour note. That's somewhat tempered, though, by the recurring b&w flashback's big revelation, which deserved a less frivolous context than this one—again, Moore's ambition outstrips his conceit—but is nonetheless quite powerful (particularly in how it retroactively recodes an earlier scene; I'd wondered why she was visibly freaking out). Critics at the time proclaimed it a big ol' mess, and they were correct. I'm kinda glad I waited to see it until now, when that messiness has been subsumed by a quarter-century’s distance, and there are other things to focus on.