Luke
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CibbuanoYoung Guns
August 25th 2006 04:03
Young Guns (1988)
What a great movie! I can't it believe it's taken me this long to watch it. Rest assured, you'll see a review of it's sequel soon enough. 'Young Guns' has it all - comedy, action, drama, Native American drugs...
Basically, the film opens with Billy the Kid (Estevez) being taken in by a kindly ranch-owner (Terrance Stamp) who puts young tearaways like Billy to work in exchange for education, food and a roof over their heads. Soon enough though things go awry (as these things do) and Billy and his fellow ranchers find themselves appointed deputy sheriffs in order to see justice done against the local corrupt law enforcers. Billy the Kid's recklessness puts them in danger though, and the 'young guns' inevitably find themselves on the run.
You wouldn't see a protagonist like Estevez's Billy the Kid these days... he's reckless, murderous and arrogant. The kind of young, dumb hothead that 80s films lionised. And I guess these sorts of characters are a lot of fun to watch if you don't take it all too seriously. There's a lot of great dialogue to be had between the other main characters as well, a lot of smart-arse calls and great one-liners. It's all good fun in that great late 80s/early 90s way... a mixture of 1880s and 1980s pop-culture (as bizarre as that sounds), equal parts gloss and grit.
My only criticisms (and they're small) are that the villain of the piece is a little undeveloped (we hardly see him) and that the time elapse at the beginning of the film didn't really seem clear enough to me. This is hardly the sort of stuff that could stop me (or anyone else really) from enjoying the film though, and the story is really about the young guns of the title; Charlie Sheen's leader, Keifer Sutherland's poet, Emilio Estevez's outlaw, Dermot Mulroney's tobacco-chewing hick (the amusingly named 'Dirty Steve'), Casey Siemaszko's worriesome pugilist, and Lou Diamond Phillip's knife-throwing Indian. So just go watch it, it's great.
TRIVIA: Tom Cruise has a walk-on cameo as one of the gunslingers firing at the siege at the end.
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