And on top of all that, my phone went dead. The phone company can't even come look at it until Thursday. No phone, no internet, eye-watering stench... I'm dealing with it okay right now, but if my cable goes out, too, I'm gonna lose my sense of humor about this REAL FAST.
Anyway, in the interest of getting out of the stink, I saw American Outlaws. I went in pretty much thinking this was going to be a big load of cinematic horse apples, but sometimes a good bad movie purges the bile the way a few shots of tequila will clean out the sinuses (what? You use your cold remedy, I'll use mine). The previews made it look like Young Guns -- or, more accurately, Young Guns II -- which is not a good thing, in case you're wondering. Instead of Martin Sheen's sons, we have James Caan's son. Obligatory borderline-has-been actor slumming: Terence Stamp in Young Guns, James Coburn in Young Guns II, Timothy Dalton here. (And no, I haven't seen Young Guns II -- I got that off the IMDB. I can't remember if I've seen Young Guns or not.)
As it turns out, American Outlaws is not that bad. It's not good, either; I just mean it's not "so bad it's good" or even, in the words of Enid from Ghost World, "so bad it went past good and came back around to bad." It's just a few notches below mediocre. It's a heavily fictionalized account of Jesse James (played by the next flavor of the month, Irish actor Colin Farrell) and his gang, with distressing overtones of anti-Yankee sentiment. The film opens with Jesse and his buddies killing Union soldiers in what's clearly meant to be an audience-rousing sequence (undermined somewhat by the sloppy fight choreography in which people fall down before they're even hit by their attacker's fist or rifle barrel -- I haven't seen such bad fighting since Suburban Roulette, which I urge you all to check out, especially if you can find the version hosted by Joe Bob Briggs), and Yankee-killing in general is played for laughs. This really is the War of Northern Aggression.
We're meant to see Jesse's bank-robbing as altruistic -- if you consider Confederate sympathies to be altruism (by this point, technically, he's fighting against the railroad boss, not the Union army, but it's made explicit that the railroaders who are trying to railroad Jesse and his friends off their land are from "the East Coast," and they don't mean South Carolina). And clearly Jesse is a humane, decent man, because while he kills scores of men from afar with gleeful abandon, when he's eye to eye with someone ... not so much.
The movie is sort of "John Ford meets John Hughes meets John Woo." The cowboy stuff is pretty cool -- it looks like this film was far more fun to make than it is to watch. But the gunfights are ludicrous, and the jokes are too broad and ... well ... stupid (most ridiculous is a proto-Burma-Shave series of signs warning a train engineer of an upcoming hazard). No cliché is left unturned -- someone actually crashes through a saloon window.
The acting is fairly vapid. Farrell is supposed to be the Next Big Thing, but though he's cute, he has the vacant look of a Keanu Reeves at times. Ali Larter as the improbably (but, it turns out, historically accurately) named Zerelda Mimms, Jesse's love interest, has just two expressions for her weirdly puffy face: coy and imperious. Scott Caan (James' son), as gang member Cole Younger, leaves no impression beyond his absurdly thick neck.
The most entertaining actors are Timothy Dalton and Gabriel Macht, who both seem to recognize and enjoy the corniness that surrounds them. Dalton, as famed lawman Allan Pinkerton, looks uncannily like Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab and sounds like a bad Sean Connery impersonator. Macht is tremendously charismatic as Jesse's brother, Frank, and perks up any scene he's in. Kathy Bates also has an enjoyably goofy cameo as the James' mother, whose entire personality is summed up in her response to her son's "thanks for being nice to my Indian friend" statement (which I won't even get into): "Well, he's a good Christian boy, and he killed a lot of Yankees, so Jesus says that make him all right in my book."
I'm not even going to bother with a summing-up statement for this. I will add that I now have proof I am ahead of the curve in the movie-critic field: recently on the Today Show, Gene Shalit suggested critics ought to review audiences instead of movies, because if people didn't go see dreck like American Pie 2, studios would stop making it. Well, I've been reviewing audiences for years! When do I get a job on the Today Show?
Back to homepage
Reviews A to F
Reviews G to L
Reviews M to R
Reviews S to Z
Search