Thursday, January 8, 2009

Tombstone

This is a movie that tells the story of Wyatt Earp and some people shooting each other in the Wild West (tm). Although it is an entertaining western I suppose, it seems as though nobody involved in Tombstone had the same end product in mind. The movie is ostensibly "dark," and is clearly a post-Unforgiven western, but while there are a lot of moments of graphic violence and/or uses of the word "fuckin'," Kurt Russell is hamming it up as Earp as though it's a kiddie movie and Bruce Broughton's generic bombastic score sounds like it's straight out of The Rocketeer. There's a huge ensemble cast, but the best part about this movie is Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday. Man, he's a great actor. I mean, he's made some serious missteps in his acting career, but he takes a lot of great roles, too. I think he's really underrated, but then again if I made The Saint I wouldn't expect people to think too highly of me, either. The lesson here is that the 90s were the worst decade for film.

RATING: 53%

5 comments:

Belabras said...

I think Val just doesn't know when to turn a project down. His Doc Holiday is probably one of his best roles, but he's really good in Salton Sea as well. I hear good things about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang too, but haven't seen it yet.

On the flip side, he's the voice of the car in the Knight Rider reboot. That should be a capital offense.

DCP said...

Yeah, he was pretty great in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I have to admit. He's good in Spartan, too, but I'm practically the only person who liked that movie so I don't know if I should recommend it or not.

Anonymous said...

He is really great. I hear he's kind of mercurial, but his work speaks for itself. I can't think of any of his films that were bad BECAUSE of him.

It's a little embarrassing, but I even kind of liked the majority of his performance in Batman Forever, though that film had plenty of problems. He's really good in the also-flawed Oliver Stone movie The Doors.

Aside from Tombstone (which I think is more of an old-school John Ford-ish alternative to darker fare like Unforgiven), I especially love Kilmer's work in Top Secret! and Heat.

Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproductions (the band) said...

that was a really nice review of val kilmer were can he pick up his ocsars

Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproductions (the band) said...

focus everyon if yall were in a freshman compostition class you would get a d+ for your reviews recently and at the top of the papper the ta would write:

You need to MAINTAIN YOUR FOCUS!