The Quick and the Dead (1995) - So You Think You Are Quick Enough?

by Crystal
(Minneapolis, MN, USA)

The Dead Don’t Come Quick Enough

The best movies are those where there is something to be won. The Mighty Ducks is great for its intense shootout at the end. In the same manner, albeit a different kind of shootout, The Quick and the Dead has the ultimate contest—shoot or die.

The story is rather simple, really. It has all those classic conventions that all Westerns proclaim as the basis of a narrative. We have the bad guy, the young guy looking to beat the bad guy (who, lets face it, is obviously the illegitimate son of the bad guy), the revenge-seeking character (in this case a mysterious woman) and the bad guy turned good guy who wants nothing more than to keep the peace but is forced to do bad anyway.

The game that brings them all together is an annual shoot-out. No, this does not involve hockey by any means. We are talking a Western shoot-out, gun-totin’ cowboys, complete with cowboys hats, horses and chewing tobacco. Anyone is free to join this contest. Entrants are paired up, shot up and eventually the last man standing wins. Pretty exciting, right? It is a little hard to believe people would enter such a competition where the odds are you’re gonna die, but we’ll go along with it for entertainment’s sake.

The movie stars Gene Hackman as Herod, the bad guy who crookedly runs the town of our setting. It goes without saying that Herod is always the last man standing...he’s still alive. Leonardo DiCaprio is our young hero desperate for daddy’s attention. Sharon Stone plays the stoic woman who is out to beat Herod for killing her father so many years ago. The delightful Russell Crowe is a former bad guy, current priest forced to enter the contest for Herod’s own amusement. Oh, and he happens to be one of the fastest gunslingers in all the land. Aren’t they all?

While the story is simple, the actors play it simple and the ending is pretty simple to figure out, the movie is not without its good points or style. Crowe and Hackman hold their own among what little material they have to work with. Crowe especially seems genuinely reluctant as the priest. Hackman can act his way through anything, and proves it here. The direction by Sam Raimi is excellent and stays true to the classic Western. We have stare downs in the desolate town played out perfectly with camera angles and cinematography. There are even a couple shots of sunlight streaming through bullet holes. It is possible Raimi is the only one who is having fun in this film.

Stone leaves a lot to be desired in this particular role. The character has no depth, no emotion, no facial expressions whatsoever. That is not her fault, necessarily, but it seems as though she thought if she played it stagnant enough, that would be interesting. She perhaps took it a little too seriously. DiCaprio is engaging, but he is trying too hard to make the movie good. He certainly cannot do it on his own.

Style is more important in The Quick and the Dead than is substance, which leaves the film lacking. The flair is nice, but so is a decent story and intriguing characters. And unlike those Ducks, very little is won in the end.