The Quick and the Dead

There is, regrettably, precious little that is quick about Sam Raimi's newest film. It drags on interminably, laying out ritualized gunfight after ritualized gunfight, while fragments of the wholly predictable backstory waft about like so much acrid gun smoke. Much of the blame with The Quick and the Dead lies with Simon Moore's patchwork script, which manages to cobble together as many western clichés as possible, and then throws in a female protagonist to give the whole mess a Nineties spin. Raimi does his best to rise above the conventions of the script, filling the gunfight scenes with gobs of style that may have worked just fine in his Dead films, but look simply ludicrous here: Wild angles, rapid cutting, and skewed camerawork do not tension make. Toward the end of the film, Raimi tosses in a few effects cribbed from Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her and one straight out of John Woo's Hard-Boiled, but even these gory crowd-pleasers seem more like acts of directorial desperation than anything else.