The Quick and the Dead Review

One shot looks clean through a hole blasted in a man's skull to the street behind him, which tells you most of what Sam Raimi wants from this material. Dante Spinotti's camera rams at faces, tilts off true, and hangs above a coffin as it rises out of the ground on a cut. Clocks fill the frame. Shadows stretch to the horizon. None of it is subtle and none of it wants to be. Gene Hackman gives Herod an unhurried contempt that nobody else in the cast can match, and Russell Crowe, before America had heard of him, finds real strain in a gunfighter who keeps failing to keep a vow.

The tournament is the trouble. A bracket is not a plot, so the middle stretch turns into a queue of colourful men stepping forward to be shot, each handed a title card's worth of character and killed before he can acquire any more. Sharon Stone has to carry the revenge story on squint and posture alone, and the flashback that explains her keeps arriving in pieces long after the mystery has stopped being one.