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Wyatt Earp (1994)
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Director:
Lawrence Kasdan |
COUNTRY
USA |
GENRE
Western |
NORWEGIAN TITLE
Wyatt Earp |
RUNNING
TIME
190 minutes |
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Producer:
Kevin Costner
Lawrence Kasdan
Jim Wilson |
Screenwriter:
Dan Gordon
Lawrence Kasdan |
Review
Lawrence Kasdan, who was such a fresh new director in the early 1980s
with films like
Body Heat and
The Big
Chill, may well have felt ambitious when making this
daunting epic about the famous title character, but apparently he
put all his ambition into reel count and running time, resulting in an
utterly uninspiring, meandering recount of Wyatt Earp's life and
times in the process. Remarkably, after the excessive 190 minutes,
you still feel as though you haven't really gotten to know Mr. Earp very
well, which is hardly a great testament to Kevin Costner's
performance. Still, the biggest problem is Kasdan's script, which is
so preoccupied with dwelling on the small and mundane that it
completely fails to bring any sense of wholeness to the story. Instead, we're
trapped in umpteen meticulously arranged sets and unaccounted-for
supporting characters who appear and disappear so quickly that their
actors' only redemption is that they don't get enough screen time to
be dragged down by Costner's out-of-depth acting.
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