Maverick

There's nothing I like better than a good Western. Someday, I even hope to see one.

Maverick, the latest movie to come down the genre's pike, isn't a good Western. It's not all together bad — it has a few daffy moments, for instance, but the gap between each joke is wider and drier than the Mojave Desert. It doesn't help that Maverick's storyline is lousy and was pretty much lifted from The Sting II (yes, The Sting II — they couldn't even steal well). These points, as well as Mel Gibson's school boy sense of humor, leave the movie running nearly on empty.

Loosely based on the old TV series, Maverick begins with a nice parody of the hangman bit from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But the minute that Gibson fades into the flashback that takes up most of the film, the story becomes hopelessly locked into a tired exercise of predictable con artist stunts and pointless inside jokes. When Danny Glover pops up to make his unbilled cameo appearance in a Lethal Weapon gag, you suddenly realize that Maverick is closer in spirit to a mediocre Road movie, minus Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

The gist of the story is that the title character, Bret Maverick, is on his way to
St. Louis for a high stakes, winner-takes-all poker championship. To raise the money for the entry fee, he plans to collect debts from old friends. But his pals keep stiffing him, so he starts working his way through some fast card hands on the trail. That's how he meets Annabelle Bransford (Jodie Foster), a lady-like thief who's also headed for St. Louis. They're quickly joined by Zane Cooper(James Garner), a stern lawman who spends his time telling everybody else what they ought to do.

Garner still has an easy charm about him, and Foster provides some good come-back material, but Gibson.is down right annoying. He delivers a smirking portrayal based upon excessive eyeball rolling and bad fits of the giggles. You half expect him to start twitching his ears like Dumbo. Anything for a laugh, mate.

When we do finally get to the poker game, Maverick loads up a river boat with TV stars. But does anybody really remember Doug McClure, Henry Darrow and Robert Fuller these days? And even if they do, shouldn't they just keep it to themselves? There's also a sprinkling of cameos by such country and western singers as Waylon Jennings and Clint Black, but they're largely wasted in throw away bits that would barely pass muster in a Kenny Rogers' Gambler opus.

And let's face it, when a movie can't out do Kenny Rogers, then it's in pretty bad shape. Maverick earns one star for Garner, one for Foster and a half star for the landscape.

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.

Tombstone

Wyatt Earp is back. Just accept it – you can’t have the return of the Western without the self-made legend of Wyatt Earp thundering back onto the screen. Tombstone is just the beginning. Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp arrives next summer. So gitty up, hombre. The marshal’s back in town.

Tombstone is one of the more schizophrenic film versions made of Wyatt and the Earp’s brothers’ exploits. On some levels, it’s the most accurate retelling of their story. But in other ways, Tombstone manages to launch so many rockets through the roof of credibility that it makes some of the older fantasy movies about the Earps look like documentaries.

Kurt Russell delivers a flat performance as a moody Wyatt who moves to the newly formed boom town of Tombstone. Being something of a family man, he brings with him two of his brothers and the wives of all three men. Lucky thing he has his brothers, too. Virgil (Sam Elliott) handles the flick’s early action, while Morgan (Bill Paxton) does all of the emoting for the clan. Along for the ride is Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. He gets to deliver the one-liners. Since everyone else takes care of the acting, Russell presumably has lots of time to wax his moustache.

Wyatt views Tombstone as a place to make a quick fortune since he feels that he did his bit for law and order back in Dodge City. But there’s an army of bad guys (who resemble a cross between the Wild Bunch and the Crips) threatening Tombstone, so, like good Republicans, the Earp boys strap on some leg iron and tin badges and start kicking butt. Before the movie’s even half over, they’re trooping off to their infamous appointment at the O.K. Corral.

As Tombstone correctly presents, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was only one in a long list of battles the boys fought. The real Wyatt’s motives for participating in the shoot-out were, at best, debatable. Some historians see Wyatt as one of the greatest lawmen who ever lived. Others view him as self-serving bullmeister whose greatest claim to fame was that he outlived virtually all of his peers – friend and foe alike (Wyatt died in Los Angeles in 1929). Tombstone strides firmly down the middle path between these perspectives and tries to have it both ways. Maybe that’s why Russell’s performance is so negligible – he really didn’t know what his character’s motivation was.

But if Russell needed to pump up his volume, the rest of the cast could have toned theirs down. Powers Booth does a hammy impersonation of Lee Marvin, while Stephen Lang plays Ilk Clanton as a nasty variation on Gabby Hayes. Dana Delaney, like the rest of the women in Tombstone, is marginal to this men’s only club. Only Kilmer stands out in this sage-brush saga of pasted-on facial hair. He’s not even that good, but he plays Holliday as such a sassy bitch that the whole movie nearly threatens to veer into some truly twisted camp masterpiece.

And, once again, Charlton Heston collects a good paycheck for two minutes worth of work. I want his agent.

The Ballad of Little Jo

The Western has taken many forms, from singing cowboys to Italian epics. But The Ballad of Little Jo is the first gender-bender, feminist horse opera. If nothing else, director Maggie Greenwald has scored a footnote in the history book.

She's done much more than that, though. The Ballad of Little Jo was inspired by a real woman, Josephine Monaghan, a cowboy whose gender wasn't discovered until after her death. Much of the film attempts to recreate the harsh realities of life in the West that explain why a woman would find it preferable to pose as a man.

In The Ballad of Little Jo, Monaghan has barely arrived out West before a decrepit peddler tries to sell her as a sex slave. It doesn't take long before Josephine discovers that in the West, a woman is either a wife or a whore. Since she doesn't want either role, she quickly cuts off her hair, pulls on some trousers and passes for one of the boys. She even starts wearing her six-shooter in the crotch position favored by gunfighters. Symbolism, anyone?

Even as a man, Little Jo has to contend with a brutish society ruled by whichever man in the bar is least drunk. The Ballad of Little Jo takes a mud-in-your-eye view of the West that's grim, but also reasonably accurate.

The movie's only real problem is its slow pace. Despite its leisurely attitude, however, its gritty tale punches some solid holes in genre conventions.