THE QUICK THE DEAD
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio,
Russell Crowe.
Screenplay: Simon Moore.
Director: Sam Raimi.
Something happens when innovative, independent directors "go Hollywood," and it's not usually a good something. Some directors are ready-made for the pressures and compromises involved in working with big stars and big budgets; others are so clearly out of their element that you can see them straining against the strictures of studio projects. Sam Raimi, director of the goofy and off-beat EVIL DEAD films, was hand-picked by Sharon Stone to helm THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, and it looks like he had some interesting ideas about how to turn it inot a cock-eyed parody of spaghetti westerns. Instead, it's not played with enough of a wink, and it becomes an extremely repetitive story muddled by tone shifts and unnecessary sub-plots.
In THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, Sharon Stone rides into the tiny Western town of Redemption as a Woman With No Name who later turns out to be named Ellen. The occasion is the annual quick-draw contest organized by John Herod (Gene Hackman), a wealthy gunman who rules the town with an iron fist. Also among the entrants are the cocky Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has something to prove to Herod, and Cort (Russell Crowe), a former riding partner of Herod's who wants to make a new start but finds it denied to him. As the contest progresses and pretenders fall by the wayside, Ellen prepares for a showdown with Herod which will end a twenty year nightmare and bring redemption to Redemption.
As THE QUICK AND THE DEAD opens, it appears that Raimi was ready and able to turn it into a light-hearted and knowing homage. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, wearing a wide-brimmed sombrero and sporting a serape over her shoulder, Stone enters Redemption at high noon looking like nothing so much as Clint Eastwood with a sex change. She runs into the obligatory collection of greasy gunfighters with gold teeth, and dispatches them with a well-aimed quip. A few of the early gunfights are handled with typical Raimi panache, including liberal use of the trackback/zoom in camera movement utilized by Hitchcock and Spielberg most notably. Everywhere there are glimpses of Raimi's twisted sense of humor, nowhere more so than in a gunfight which ends with the loser staring down at his shadow and noticing a hole in it.
But that's all we get in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD -- glimpses. Where Raimi wants self-awareness, screenwriter Simon Moore delivers a fairly standard Western revenge saga. The story has potential, and particularly when a flashback reveals the source of Ellen's grief there is evidence of some compelling psychological background. There are also too many distracting side stories along the way, and that is where Moore blunders and finds his story bogging way, way down. The simmering animosity between Ellen and Herod works, most effectively in a tense confrontation at a dinner table; the rivalry between the Kid and Herod doesn't. The relationship between Cort and Herod might have been exploited better, but for the most part Cort is playing a part culled entirely from Eastwood's penitent gunslingers in PALE RIDER and UNFORGIVEN.
And this is the real knock on THE QUICK AND THE DEAD: without a real focus on Raimi's satirical sensibilities and acrobatic camera tricks, it's just a less-than-mediocre knock-off of Eastwood's oeuvre. Gene Hackman is a marvelous villain, oozing despicable charm, but his presence only magnifies the comparisons to UNFORGIVEN, and when he exposes a boastful gunman (Lance Henriksen) as a fraud, it sounds exactly like his debunking of English Bob's self-aggrandizing tales in that earlier film. Sharon Stone is surprisingly effective as the haunted vengeance-seeker, but ultimately she too is lost in a story that doesn't really seem to have a sense of purpose. THE QUICK AND THE DEAD boasts some fine cinematography by Dante Spinotti and a wonderfully dilapidated production design, and they could have been used in the service of a nice piece of parody. Unfortunately, Raimi couldn't or wouldn't let the throttle out, and THE QUICK AND THE DEAD stalls when it's played far too straight.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 orders of spaghetti: 5.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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