TOMBSTONE

TOMBSTONE (Directed by George P. Cosmatos. Starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliot, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Dana Delany, Jason Priestly, Joanna Pacula, Michael Rooker, Billy Zane)

IN A gravely voiceover, describing Wyatt Earp’s funeral, Robert Mitchum declares “Tom Mix wept!” And so he would if he saw the state of the modern western.

If Rambo III director George P. Cosmatos has not assembled a cast quite as eclectically impressive as Robert Altman’s, he has nonetheless roped in enough macho stars to start a stampede in a gay bar. The problem is it is a little hard to tell most of them apart, as they labour under a series of quite enormous moustaches. These are no doubt worn to impart an air of historical accuracy, although one seriously wonders why they bothered, since the film-makers are patently more interested in recreating old westerns than the old west.

It opens with a merciless Peckinpah slaughter at a wedding, after which the priest intones the apocalyptic “behold a pale horse . . .” passage from Revelations, although it does not so much suggest a reading from the Bible as a voiceover for the trailer. The immediate problem is that Clint Eastwood already used the passage in Pale Rider. And Kurt Russell stepping off a train doesn’t have quite the same impact as Clint riding into town, especially when Kurt’s facial hair makes him resemble the old timer from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Tombstone tries to have its cake and shoot it up too. It’s got gun battles, and drunken saloon fights, showdowns at high noon and rides into the sunset, but it attempts to filter in a wide historical perspective, add a feminist romance and give it all a knowingly revisionist edge. These cowboys have bitten off more than any man can chew.

The drama becomes unfocused in the welter of characters, the western clichés undermine the historical trimmings, the modern coda of violent redemption pales in the long shadow of Eastwood’s Unforgiven, and the romance is entirely misjudged, like Billy The Kid snogging Gloria Steinham. Worst of all, the legendary gunfight gets swamped, turning up in the middle of the film with little dramatic thrust and coming over as a kind of average spat at the OK corral.

It does have its moments however, most of them belonging to Val Kilmer. As a consumptive, camp young Doc Holliday, played like a poet of the gun already half in love with death, he seems to be in a movie of his own, but at least it’s an interesting one. Surrounded by the macho men, he makes them all look rather silly. Tombstone could have done with a little more silliness, and a little less grandiosity. On this evidence, the western revival looks like it could be dead before it gets it boots on.