The Long Riders

Hill is very much in the American grain, the inheritor of the Ford-Hawks-Walsh tradition of artful, understated action film making.

Walter Hill's first outright failure.

What's ultimately missing is a definable point of view which would tie together the myriad events on display and fill in the blanks which Hill has imposed on the action by sapping it of emotional or historical meaning.

A beautiful, laconic and unsentimental film.

Strips away a lot of the steely gazes and taciturn men from Hill's first few pictures and gives us richly detailed interpersonal dynamics in the James-Younger gang and the men and women circling around them.

The Long Riders is exceptionally well made, but I came out feeling that there was no pressing reason to make it at all.

The Long Riders sounds like merely a gimmick -- cast real-life brothers as real-life outlaw siblings -- but it turned out to be one of the last decent Westerns to hit the big screen until the early 1990s brought us Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven.

This languidly fatalistic rendering of the oft lionized bank robbers is one of the few revisionist westerns to equal the gritty poetry of Hill's predecessor Sam Peckinpah.

The cinematography is perfect, the folklore is wisely managed, and the music is excellent. [Full Review in Spanish]

The Long Riders isn't quite sure which way it wants to ride, but the action scenes and cinematography make up for any misdirection.