Wyatt Earp

Before Kevin Costner agreed to play the title role, Wyatt Earp was intended to be a six-hour TV mini-series. It's not clear how they were going to fill all of that time on the boob tube with the debatable details about the old West's most dubious self-made legend, but it might have played better than this movie. Even with its three-hours-plus running time, Wyatt Earp is a choppy production with large narrative gaps and an excessively narrow focus.

The partly fabricated plot of Wyatt Earp attempts a sweeping biography of the frontier lawman, from his early childhood in Iowa to his bloody career in Dodge City and Tombstone. The movie wants to present Earp as a contradictory mix of idealism and violence, so when the teenage Wyatt witnesses his first killing, he instantly vomits from shock. Two hours into the movie, he's gunning men down with the steely precision of a mob hit man. Unfortunately, the long stretch in between doesn't really explain how Wyatt so thoroughly progressed from a naive lad to a harsh and oppressive gunman. All we get is the vague suggestion that he was mindlessly ensnared by the clannish dictates of his sternly aloof father (Gene Hackman).

Costner plays the singularly most colorless Earp ever to cross the screen. His performance wavers between blank looks and painful stares, and he's totally lacking in the off-beat Western charm that the real Earp reportedly possessed. Dennis Quaid is surprisingly good as Doc Holliday, but he and the rest of the all-star cast are wasted in roles that are primarily glorified cameos. Only Wyatt is given any emphasis, and he's duller than a rusty tin badge.

So if you're enamored of Earp's story, you're better off renting last year's loony-tune production of Tombstone. At least it was lively.