Awesome:
- Sam Shepard in a western is always awesome. Even that silly one about history’s most famous gunslingers stuck in purgatory.
- Brad Pitt is a pretty menacing and unstable Jesse James.
- Casey Affleck’s Creepy Nervous Smile™.
Stupid:
- Molasses slow pacing made me want to shoot Jesse James way before Affleck actually did it.
- Could they have smeared more Vaseline on the lens?
- Perfect placement of bathtubs plus heavy use of post-processing evokes erectile dysfunction drug commercial.
Pointless:
- James Carville loves attention. Thanks for taking work away from a character actor who probably could have used the paycheck, Jimmy.
- Lots of extended takes of characters with watery eyes staring at things.
- Narration started out as an interesting choice then became tiresome, then annoying.
Final Word:
An interesting story with some good performances, but excessive post-processing and coma-inducing pace ultimately fails to hold my attention. I guess long, inward-looking-to-the-point-of-almost-crying-all-the-time westerns aren’t for me. (IMDb)
DVD Commentaries
Movie Review Vlogs
All Comments
@FilmPigs
Film Pigs Facebook Page
Heh, heh, heh. Caught the end of this on cable recently, and Affleck and Pitt were great* (which is isn’t always true) but it was obvious the pacing was planned by a tortoise. I was thinking of catching the whole thing, but you have reinforced my gut reaction and dissuaded me.
* But not as great as Todd is in his man-on-the-street-interviews commercial, which I totally recognized him in
At over 2 1/2 hours I simply can’t recommend the movie. If it was a tight 90 minutes, I bet I would have liked it. But Hollywood (with the exception of George Clooney) seems incapable of making economical features anymore.
I LOVE Westerns, and will watch anything with Sam Shepard, but I couldn’t get past the first 20 min of this one.