My vote is for mildly awesome. To me it is an obviously superior remake of ARIZONA RAIDERS.
I love Westerns, real Westerns. The forties through the early sixties were the classic era, but there were a few poor ones in that span, of which ARIZONA RAIDERS was one.
The late sixties and seventies were a disaster in making movies, except for comedies. There was a desire to force worlds upon the public which narrow minded, self righteous, racist producers, dirctors, and writers wanted to force. They fooled the ignorant masses with their speeches about "art, realism, etc", but they lacked all of those.
The Westerns were hit the hardest. It was a case of fixing something that wasn't broken. The Westerns of the fifties had fantastic situations, but credible characters. The late sixties and seventies, and particularly Leone, took away the best of both worlds. They tried to fool us into thinking their films were realistic by taking away the colorful vests and putting them in dusty clothes. This turned out to make them look like buffoons, historically, because their characters and plots were complete one dimensional cardboard cutouts, complete cliches, and not a bit believable. Plus, anyone who wasn't a complete wacko could care less about the psychotic characters of those movies. If those characters were the West, there wouldn't be a West. There wouldn't be human beings on the planet.
The eighties saw a desire to bring fun and entertainment back into films, but the sets and costumes were still drab, and the characters still remnants of the cliches of the seventies. THE LONG RIDERS is a case in point. Better than the disaster of the seventies, but still inferior to the golden age Westerns.
So some crafty directors and producers since then have managed to give us the "realism look" and given us "realistic characters". This film is a case in point. It is one of the best depictions in film of an anti hero. He isn't always right, and we don't always agree with him, but we understand him as something besides a cliche. He is a three dimensional character with a method to his madness.
I'm pretty awed by this film. I just hesitate a bit because of a few lulls, and because the beginning is difficult to understand, but those are very minor. I rate it 9/10
Lets not bicker about who killed whom
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