The Quick and the Dead (1995)

Purely Joyful Movie!

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I wanted very badly to love this movie and it was mostly good. But the main character portrayed by Sharon Stone was simply not believable. And not for any type of sexist reason. I could totally get behind the character itself, it was the acting that continuously broke the immersion for me. While the rest of the actors did a fine job of portraying their characters to the point that I forgot they were actors, multiple times I found myself thinking "this really isn't Sharon Stone's best performance". It just felt like she was trying too hard.

A western goes completely against his style, the acting is decent and its a fun movie but it shouldn't be a western

It is quite remarkable that "The Quick and the Dead" hangs together as well as it does. The film, needlessly overly stylised and forced into balancing too many ideas; stories and characters all at once, does not disgrace itself but similarly does not have you walk away from it feeling as if you have seen anything of any terrific substance. We are left wondering as to how a character, who was pronounced dead the last time we saw them, was up and walking and shooting as straight as they always could a mere five minutes later; left unsatisfied at the actually rather fascinating narrative between an aging sociopath and his cocksure son who is looking to inherit the autocratic rule which dominates the destiny of the small Old West town he runs; left underwhelmed at how the potential for romance between said cocksure son and a certain female character is not taken any further than what it was.This is a difficult film to recommend, but an even difficult film to entirely dislike. Its struggles derive from its short run-time and its bloated number of characters: a number of actually really fascinating stories about people who might otherwise have existed some 130 years ago are being told at once, but director Sam Raimi is forced, seemingly, into squeezing each of them into a run-time that constitutes as "commercial".Sharon Stone, in the tradition of westerns looking to tear up the rule-book, plays an otherwise unnamed lead (referred to throughout as "The Lady") who rides into an isolated Old West town called Redemption for reasons unexplained. She takes no flak from anyone – when one of the town's many grizzled male sociopaths drools "You're Purty" to her, she whips back "...you're not", which was particularly brave given he had just shot a man in the back and carved a mark onto his arm with a blade.Stone does what she can with the role, but her job is made harder by the film's eagerness to fall into traps of transgression – specifically, a woman is allowed to effectively 'lead' the film but the male audience, for whom the film is made, must be reminded of her 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. Take the opening, which is typical of any western opening with regards to its guitar music and desert locality, whereby somebody is shot off their horse by a trigger happy gold hunter. When it's revealed to be Stone, we are surprised at the fact it's a woman, and the manner about which the music begins to encompass sounds of a whip cracking, on top of the fact Stone has comically shackled the gold hunter to his wagon, suddenly alludes to a certain sexiness or quirky kinkiness she's supposed to embody.Meanwhile, in the town, Russell Crowe's character Cort is having a bad time at the hands of he who runs the place – Gene Hackman's suitably evil John Herod. Herod, a sadist and a psychopath, has dragged Cort away from his existence as a Christian missionary and to a place where people have seemingly been blinded into spitting on religion because here, Herod is God. Cort has some history with the man – they both used to be as bad as Herod presently is until Crowe's character turned away from violence. During The Lady's time in this place, and without giving anything away, it is alluded to that Herod was responsible for the death of someone quite close to her, while complicating matters is Leonardo Di Caprio, who play's Herod's son. He takes a liking to The Lady.These dynamics revolve around, of all things, a gun-slinging tournament, whereby 16 entrants fast-draw every time the town clock strikes the top of the hour – needless to say, most of the fighters are present in the tournament to make up the numbers so that the four that count can come to blows. In the interim, we find out what makes each of these people tick and how they have reached where they are in their lives – the backstories are substantial and often gripping; many would make for fascinating films all unto themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the competition very quickly mutates into a fight to the death, lest the film's title seem misplaced.There is enough to admire in "The Quick and the Dead", but equally enough to become frustrated by. I've no doubt of the film's origins – those Italian and Spanish westerns of the 1960's, the likes of which are embedded at the very epicentre of Raimi's piece. The trouble with this is that, during one particularly harrowing scene, we are instantly reminded of the similar fate of a character in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. There are other issues, such as the realism related to whether Hackman's character, having experienced what he did as a boy in relation to his father, would then grow up to bestow upon everyone else what it is that he does.As said, there is too much going on and too many characters and their tales to fit into a mainstream run-time. Three years later, Raimi would make "A Simple Plan", which really is a quality film about people; predicaments and the way folks interact with their situations and one another. Needless to say, that film was longer and much better. You could do much worse than "The Quick and the Dead", but then if you looked hard enough, you could probably do a lot better.

a useful film. for rediscover the flavor of western. for admire the good work of actors. for admire different human types . and for a different image of violence. far to be a great film, it is a pleasant one.for cultural references, for the trip in the past of people around a competition. for Sharon Stone and Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman and, off course, for the brilliant Leonardo di Caprio. tension and embroidery of stories. secrets and the search of truth. and a beautiful performance of Gene Hackman like a kind of Shere Khan of a dusty small town. the film has a good plot and great cast. and a director who knows explores each detail of a contest who starts as a collection of appearances, masks and references to the past.