[7]
Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman star in this stylized western revenge tale from director Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, Darkman). Stone plays a gunslinger who enters a ramshackle frontier town’s dueling tournament where she hopes to slay Hackman’s character, the town’s ruthless ruler who murdered her father when she was just a child. While Simon Moore’s screenplay falls into a rinse-and-repeat narrative cycle with nearly a dozen separate duel scenes, the characters and performances in The Quick and the Dead are compelling enough to keep you engaged.
Stone channels her inner Eastwood for much of the film. She’s a woman of few words, but the character’s still a human being — she gets vulnerable in the second half, and it makes us want to root for her. Hackman has never been more purely evil than he is in this film — and that’s saying something given the Oscar-winner’s storied career. He’s the Joker to Stone’s Batman here, and you can’t wait to see him get his just desserts. The supporting cast is equally stellar. Russel Crowe makes his American film debut as a preacher who used to run wild with Hackman’s gang. Hackman keeps him shackled for much of the film and forces him to compete in the tournament against his newfound moral judgment. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hackman’s son, a young man trying to win his father’s respect by entering the tournament even if it means getting killed. Raimi fills the smaller roles with top character actors like Lance Henriksen, Keith David, Tobin Bell (Saw), Roberts Blossom, Pat Hingle, and Gary Sinise.
Raimi breathes his comic book and horror film sensibilities into the piece, aided tremendously by film editor Pietro Scalia, who keeps the story moving at a break-neck pace without robbing the audience of rich character moments and cinematic grace notes. It’s not the most ambitious or original story ever told, but it’s told pretty damn well. It’s worth a look for fans of any of these actors, the director, or character-driven westerns.
With Raynor Scheine, Woody Strode, and Kevin Conway.