Open Range
Kevin Costner has taken a lot of heat over the last decade or so, and considering disasters like The Postman and Waterworld (for which he technically isn't credited as director but was after Kevin Reynolds walked off the set), he deserves it. Costner stuck to just acting for a while before getting back behind the camera for Open Range, his second ode to the western. Unlike Dances With Wolves, which heaped far more praise on Costner than he deserved and caused the swelled head that produced the aforementioned debacles, Open Range sticks to the fundamental principles of the genre—that there was in fact some manner of honor among these hardened souls who worked their fingers to the bone and tamed the west. These simple men live by this code, and when that code is violated, a reckoning must be sought.
Open Range is an elegant homage to that timeless story—elegant and wordy. Maybe there was nothing better to do on the range than talk to each other, I don't know. But the musings of an old man with a lot of miles on his odometer and a middle-aged man living with his fair share of sins past can only hold your attention so long. Fortunately in this case, it's just long enough to reach the film's spectacular final gunfight. Costner hasn't lost his knack for shooting action sequences or landscapes (his only saving graces as a director), but here he's also smart enough to focus on his outstanding co-stars as much as possible, with the exception of a much underutilized Michael Gambon. Robert Duvall, by the way, has quietly settled into a niche as a grizzled old frontiersman quite nicely (check out Walter Hill's Broken Trail if you like him in this sort of thing).
- February 11, 2007
DVD Extras
All of the bonus materials are on disc two, which I didn't rent, so I can't comment; but I can give an A+ to the crackling good DTS audio track, which lights up the film's climactic shootout.