western directed
by : Christopher Cain featuring
: Emilio Estevez - Kiefer Sutherland - Lou Diamond Phillips - Charles Sheen running
time : 1 hour 47 minutes
In this Western based
loosely on actual events and people, Emilio Estevez stars as William H.
Bonney (aka Billy the Kid). Sought for a petty crime in Lincoln County,
Billy is taken in by John Tunstall (Terrence Stamp), a British ranch owner
seeking to make it in the cattle business. Tunstall employs a group of
"regulators," comprised of wayward youths he's gathered over the years,
to watch over his ranch; in turn, he teaches them how to read and reforms
them into better men. Tunstall's business interests come into conflict
with those of corrupt and murderous businessman Lawrence Murphy (Jack Palace),
whose widespread connections make him a power to be reckoned with. When
Tunstall won't budge from his right to pursue a living, Murphy's henchmen
stage an ambush and kill him. This triggers a vow of vengeance from the
quick-tempered Billy and his five fellow regulators, who are deputized
to serve arrest warrants in the murder. However, when Billy decides to
gun down the suspects instead of detaining them, his loyal pals become
accessories in a vigilante spree to wipe the territory clean of Murphy
and his web of conspirators. Soon, the supposed lawmen are on the run from
bounty hunters, henchmen, and government soldiers, from all directions
of the compass. This box-office hit also stars Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland,
Lou Diamond Phillips, Dermot Mulroney, and Casey Siemaszko.
Young Guns
was surprisingly successful at taking a rusty genre, the Western, and making
it accessible and interesting to the Brat Pack generation. The result is
a popcorn film popular enough to have spawned a sequel two years later,
yet not good enough to land on many lists of favorite Westerns. Still,
it's not as conventional as one might expect. For starters, Estevez's Billy
the Kid is far more gleefully sadistic than most other Western antiheroes
get to be, especially those designed for the consumption of teenagers.
The film also features a narratively unimportant yet strangely fascinating
sequence in which the characters trip on peyote, complete with vomit, dangerously
aimless shotgun blasts, and an underwater-sounding audio track that seems
like an experimental coup on the part of director Christopher Cain. Add
in the premature death of one of the film's biggest stars, and Young Guns
is not as easy to telegraph as it should be. Still, it's not as exciting
as it should be, either � the climactic set piece is the only sustained
gun battle, and it gets resolved extremely improbably. While the back stories
of the key characters are meant to give them soul, they are clumsily handled,
particularly Sutherland's tacked-on affair with a Chinese girl enslaved
by his enemy. Young Guns has a certain comforting familiarity to its target
audience, but not much of a following beyond that.
