The Hi-Lo Country (R) * 1/2 Starring Billy Crudup, Woody Harrelson Directed by Stephen Frears A Review by Frankie Paiva
The modern use of the western movie, and the western genre has almost evaporated. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Wild Wild West are some of the most recent entries, both of them were bad, and this one is coming right along to join them. What starts out like a promising desert film (Martin Scorsese is one of the producers) turns into boring drech.
Pete Calder (Crudup, who was Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits) is new to Hi-Lo, New Mexico. He's here to start his cattle business and quickly makes friends with, oh, the western version of Woody Harrelson (and, what a surprise, he's played by Woody Harrelson) his name is Big Boy and he's in the same business. The two men constantly go to the bar, and celebrate the death of a man that they beat in poker.
When Mona (Patricia Arquette) crosses through both of their lives, they are both lovestruck and each of them begin their own private affairs. The men struggle to keep their bonds alive while they are constantly drunk, herding cattle, and making crude sexual references. (If this doesn't sound like a classic western you're right.) The film follows the two men's lives until one character dies, by the time we get there, we don't really care.
There are three problems in The Hi-Lo Country. One, Harrelson seems to have his role written exactly for him. Rather than seeing Harrelson's Big Boy character when I looked on the screen, I saw Woody Harrelson playing the same type of Woody-ized character that he always plays. This also goes for Arquette, who's role seems Patricia-ized for her and reminded me constantly of her Alice character in Lost Highway. Two, the film is boring. So boring in fact, that I believe my minutes of film to yawn ratio is 6:2. Three, The film plays in no particular order, showing us a handful of random events that don't have any meaning to what happens in the conclusion. Add some sappy drama, and you've got another bad western, The Hi-Lo Country gets * 1/2 stars.
A Review by Frankie Paiva The 12 Year-Old Movie Reviewer E-Mail me at SwpStke@aol.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews