When Midwest Film Journal does a monthlong series about someone, this is usually the part where we philosophically pontificate on ideas about the individual perhaps not raised by one of the essays yet to come. But we’ll just say Kurt Russell also rules in Backdraft, Breakdown, Dark Blue, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, Poseidon and Sky High — which we’ve covered elsewhere on the site. Just not here, in the largest-yet series we’ve ever had for an individual. Join us all month as we celebrate Russell’s 75th birthday with Kurt Response.
Nostalgia is weird. I know I like Tombstone. I own it on DVD. I had a copy of the poster in my dorm room once upon a time. Like every dude my age, I’ve said “I’m your huckleberry” more times than I can count. It’s a classic from my early teenage years, and when I look at my lifelong love of Westerns, it’s one of the major landmarks on a throughline that runs all the way back to watching John Wayne movies from my grandpa’s lap. Every memory I have of this movie is positive, all the way back to seeing it on the big screen at the local multiplex when I was 13.
So you can imagine my surprise when I watched it a few days ago and my first thought was “Huh. This movie is really awful.”
As far as surprises go, though, that was the silver medal for the evening, coming in a distant second behind how much I enjoyed it anyway.
It’s fitting that this series is a celebration of Kurt Russell because I’m pretty sure most of what makes this nonsense work on any level comes back to Russell and his utter inability to suck. No matter how bad the dialogue, no matter if he’s trying to act opposite wooden stand-ins like Bill Paxton and Dana Delaney, no matter how ludicrous the direction, Russell (like Wyatt Earp, his role in this “historical” Western) turns his piercing glare to the camera, sets that legendary jaw and refuses to surrender to the onrushing forces of inanity and cliche. Even a tortured, hackneyed line like “You called down the thunder, well now you’ve got it!” sounds like Shakespeare when Russell bellows it from behind a mustache the size of a Buick.
Tombstone is ostensibly a fictionalized retelling of the historical exploits of the Earp brothers — played here by Russell, along with Sam Elliott as eldest brother Virgil and the absolutely useless Paxton as youngest Morgan — and their friends as they take on the villainous-for-no-apparent-reason Cowboy gang in the titular mining town. Those friends include tubercular gunslinger and gambler Doc Holliday, played with reckless abandon by Val Kilmer, the film’s other saving grace. Wyatt is married, but when touring actress Josephine Marcus (Delaney, who should have stuck to TV) catches his eye, he finds himself conflicted about what he wants out of life. This might prove interesting, but the only character development we ever see from his wife, Mattie (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), is that she likes laudanum. Really, really likes laudanum. Like a lot.
The bad guys, led by Curly Bill Brocius (Powers Boothe, overplaying every line) and Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn, looking alternately menacing and bored to be there) do bad-guy stuff around town until Virgil can’t take it anymore and agrees to become the town marshal, with Morgan as his deputy. The historic gunfight at the OK Corral is weirdly anticlimactic, and the back half of the movie is centered on Wyatt taking revenge after the Cowboys murder Morgan and maim Virgil as a response. (Side note: Although screenwriter Kevin Jarre did terrible work here, we can’t blame him for the “Cowboys” thing; apparently the real-life gang also utterly lacked imagination in the naming department.)
It’s hard to tell if the bad screenplay led to bad performances or if a better effort from the cast could have made the script work better, but one thing is certain: The terrible direction would have killed it either way. While Hollywood apocrypha does suggest Russell directed some of Tombstone himself, it’s credited to George P. Cosmatos, and I know it’s easy to wonder how the master craftsman who brought Stallone’s Cobra to life could have slipped so far, but here we are.
If you can think of a bad directing cliché, Cosmatos not only beat you to it but repeated it three times to make sure no one missed it. Totally unnecessary narrator framing the movie with historical context rather than doing any actual onscreen exposition? Check. Sick character coughing blood into a handkerchief? Check. Protracted deathbed speeches complete with a distant stare? Check. Extreme close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes before they draw? Check, so many times. Tombstone is less a coherent movie and more of a two-hour trailer, like someone thought of some cool-looking Western shots and just happened to string them together with the same characters. Somehow, Cosmatos delivered a Western without even figuring out how to shoot a good gunfight; in the climactic duel between Ringo and Holliday, a showdown with epic potential, he stages the combatants so close together it looks more like a knife fight. You don’t have to be a firearms expert to know, at that range, nobody could possibly survive. Maybe Cosmatos doesn’t understand how guns work? No idea, but when every action sequence gets laughs rather than wows, you missed the mark.
So, yeah, Tombstone kind of sucks. You won’t get an argument from me there, and if I had more space, you might get even more complaints. It doesn’t matter, though, because somehow — even with the bad lines, the bad directing and Bill effing Paxton — it’s impossible to ignore what Russell and Kilmer bring to the screen.
There’s a scene early on, meant to establish Wyatt as cool under pressure and unafraid of bullies, where he confronts a crooked faro dealer (Billy Bob Thornton, of all people) and throws him out of the saloon. Nothing about the scene should work. It’s as subtle as a fart joke, and the dialogue is incomprehensible pseudo-Western slang, like if you fed some of Ian McShane’s lines from Deadwood into an LLM. It doesn’t matter, though, because when Russell growls “No need to go heeled to get the bulge on a tub like you” at Thornton’s sputtering bully, he has complete command of the screen. A lesser actor might watch that word salad line fall totally flat. But in that moment, Russell impossibly rises above the cliché. Yes, it’s unsubtle, but it delivers: Wyatt Earp is not to be fucked with, and he knows it. He challenges Thornton to pull his gun (or “skin that smoke wagon,” per this weird Western slang that they only use in this one scene) and then slaps him in the face. “You gonna do somethin’ or just stand there and bleed?” That’s some cool movie-hero stuff right there, and Russell delivers it to perfection.
Russell and Kilmer are incredible together as well. Russell roars and growls, and it plays perfectly off Kilmer’s air of quiet, understated menace. I’m fairly certain Cosmatos didn’t intend to imply Holliday was actually the love of Wyatt’s life, but it’s hard not to see it that way compared to the utter lack of chemistry between Russell and Delaney. The friendship between the two characters feels deep and genuine, with two talented actors taking it well beyond the script. Kilmer’s is the performance that gets more attention, but he had much more to work with overall. The best lines are Holliday’s; when Wyatt gets a couple decent laugh lines, they’re literally talking to himself, meaning Russell has to break that levity without even bouncing it off a partner.
That is, I think, where the nostalgia comes from for me. A year from now, I won’t remember that Boothe plays a scene where he’s supposed to be high on opium like a Mormon teenager trying to act drunk or that the climax of the film is mostly a series of montages in which Wyatt Earp gallops around shooting at unseen bad guys while sporting the same haircut as the middle kid on Home Improvement. I’ll remember Wyatt slapping the faro dealer. I’ll remember Doc coolly shrugging off his coat without lowering his shotgun at the OK Corral. Tombstone could be a much better movie, sure, but it doesn’t really matter. For a little over two hours, Kurt Russell is Wyatt Earp and Wyatt Earp is a badass.
