TOMBSTONE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehn, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Dana Delaney, Powers Boothe, Stephen Lang. Screenplay: Kevin Jarre. Director: George P. Cosmatos.
After a few decades when Westerns were about as easy to find as Jimmy Hoffa, it seems like you can't sneeze at the movies these days without hitting a horse. The success of DANCES WITH WOLVES and UNFORGIVEN has inspired a whole herd of giddyap yarns. In 1993 we've already seen POSSE and GERONIMO: AN AMERICAN LEGEND, and now comes the first of two Wyatt Earp projects set to hit theaters in a six month span (a Lawrence Kasdan/Kevin Costner project is due in late spring). TOMBSTONE is the name, ma'am, and surprisingly lively entertainment is the game. While no great piece of art, TOMBSTONE is a real old-fashioned shoot-em-up, energetically staged and acted and featuring a particularly memorable performance from Val Kilmer.
TOMBSTONE opens in 1879 as Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) arrives in Tombstone, Arizona to join brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton). Although a legendary lawman in Kansas, Wyatt insists he's retired, content to run a small casino in the booming mining town. However, peace and quiet are not in the cards for the Earps. The wild and violent Cowboys, led by Curly Bill (Powers Boothe) and Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), hold Tombstone in a perpetual state of lawlessness, and eventually the violence escalates into the legendary showdown at the OK Corral, with the Earps and gambler Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) facing a group of Cowboys including Ike Clanton (Stephen Lang). But even that battle is not the end, as Tombstone becomes the nexus of a blood feud which won't end until one side or the other is completely dead.
Director George P. Cosmatos is best known for the ultra-violent RAMBO, and TOMBSTONE shows many similarities. There is a great deal of montage-style violence, and an armory full of bullets fired. It's action that TOMBSTONE is about first and foremost, and it delivers big time. There are few slow stretches, and they usually build towards something. The big shootout at the OK Corral might be the least effective of the action pieces; it's edited in a fairly confusing fashion which may accent the chaos of the situation but doesn't always make it clear who's shooting whom. Otherwise the action is extremely well-choreographed, backed up by a Bruce Broughton score a bit too reminiscent of his work on SILVERADO.
Fortunately, the action is where the comparisons to RAMBO end. TOMBSTONE is well-acted by its ensemble cast, in spite of the most distracting (if authentic) facial hair this side of GETTYSBURG. Kurt Russell, never the most versatile of leading men, does bring an intense and reluctant heroism to Wyatt. He's particularly good in a couple of scenes where he uses his reputation to force other men to back down, burning holes in them with his eyes. Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton are a bit more wooden in less-developed roles, but for the stoic and civic-minded Earps it's not a distraction. The lead Cowboys are uniformly good, notably Stephen Lang as the cowardly Ike Clanton and Michael Biehn as the icy Johnny Ringo. However, the real star of TOMBSTONE is Val Kilmer, who has a devilishly wonderful time with the acerbic, sickly Doc Holliday. Sure, his lines are campy and anachronistic, but they are also quite funny. He drawls out his quips with a sly confidence, and turns in probably his best all-around performance yet.
TOMBSTONE's one glaring misstep is spending any time at all on the relationship between Wyatt and a traveling actor played by Dana Delaney. Delaney is lovely, but her character is just a distraction (as, unfortunately, are all of the female characters in TOMBSTONE), never adding anything in particular to the story or to Wyatt's character. Their scenes together seem simply to be a nod to the conventional wisdom that you need a love story to get women into the theater. While it's spending time wandering through the flowers, TOMBSTONE is nothing special, but when it sticks to its guns it generally finds its target.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 shootouts: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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