Legendary lawman Wyatt Earp (Val Kilmer) regales a reporter with the tale of how he and three of his friends pursued a pair of bloodthirsty brothers across the American southwest.

CRITIQUE

Wyatt Earp’s Revenge is cheap, poorly made, badly written, and indifferently acted (the only good performances come from the horses). It’s not so much a western as it is a bunch of wannabes playacting at making a western. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was a direct-to-video Young Guns knockoff that went unreleased for two decades.

The plot unfolds in flashbacks, the older Earp sitting down with a reporter and explaining how he (the young Earp is played by Shawn Roberts), Bat Masterson (Matt Dallas), Charlie Bassett (Scott Whyte), and Bill Tighman (Levi Fiehler) set out to hunt down James (Daniel Booko) and Sam Kenedy (Steven Grayhm). The Kenedy boys are wanted in connection with the murder of Dora Hand (Diana DeGarmo), a singer/actress who was once in a relationship with Earp. Earp’s superiors have no interest in pursuing the Kenedys, as the patriarch of the Kenedy clan, Milflin (Trace Adkins), has either bought them off or cowed them into fearing his wrath.

So it’s your standard western tale of vengeance and justice; nothing unexpected about that (it’s rarer to find a western that doesn’t revolve around this sort of story). But the movie doesn’t go anywhere, do anything, or offer any surprises. The script (by first-timer Darren Benjamin Shepherd, from a story by producers Jeffery Schenck and Peter Sullivan) meanders; there’s absolutely no drive whatsoever to the storytelling. Rather than getting to it, the movie wastes time on unnecessary asides and scenes that serve no purpose.

Director Michael Feifer’s slack pacing doesn’t help. Scenes that actually do serve a purpose are bloated by extraneous footage; there’s an awful lot of superfluous riding and walking here. Worse still, Feifer fumbles all of the action; the gun- and fistfights are dull and incompetently shot. (Feifer isn’t new to the directing game. He’s helmed numerous television projects, but most of them are the sort of thing you find on ABC Family during the holidays, those sappy, saccharine Christmas flicks that invariably involve talking dogs or a widower who finds love with his kids’ new nanny.)

Consequently, there’s almost nothing in the way of character development. Earp is determined, the Kenedy boys are psychopaths, and everyone else is just everyone else. Earp’s traveling companions are faceless, interchangeable ciphers; I couldn’t keep up with who was who or why each had been chosen for the journey (other than the fact that all such stories require a posse of at least four guys). The Kenedy boys ride with two likeminded psychopaths, but I’ll be damned if I know who they are or what purpose they serve (other than symmetry, of course).

After ambling along for eighty minutes, the movies climaxes with a confrontation that’s just as dull as everything that precedes it. It looks as if the four heroes are going to end up tangling with a much larger force, but it doesn’t come to be. The elder Kenedy decides he doesn’t want any trouble and extricates him and most of his underlings from the story. (The movie builds him up to be some sort of ruthless warlord, but he’d apparently rather retire for the night with his pipe and slippers.) Then it looks as if the four heroes are going to duke it out with the younger Kenedys and their psycho buddies, but five of the eight participants quickly disappear (the sudden disappearance of characters is a frequent occurrence here). All you’re left with is a lame tussle between Earp and James Kenedy, and the only distraction it provides comes from trying to decide why the gunshot Kenedy takes to his right brachial artery doesn’t prove to be more of a hindrance to his ability to throw punches.

Any movie not set in our world is tasked with creating an environment that looks lived-in and believable. Whether the setting is historical or otherworldly, the artifice of the setting mustn’t show. Wyatt Earp’s Revenge locales look phony. You can tell the sets were completed immediately before shooting began. The storefronts and homesteads look new, hastily constructed, built of materials purchased from a nearby Lowe’s. Clothes look new and unnaturally clean, certainly not the sort of thing you’d expect to see on people making a hardscrabble living on the open frontier. It’s noticeable right off the bat, and proves to be a distraction for the rest of the movie.    

The movie claims to be based on a true story, but that claim is as specious as most such claims usually are. The plot is inspired by an event that is likely apocryphal, making an attempt to provide an explanation for a mysterious incident from Earp’s life. But even if that event is true, the movie’s explanation for it is completely bogus, either playing fast and loose with the truth of Earp’s life (the portrayal of his first meeting with one of his most famous compatriots is contrived nonsense) or simply making things up (such as the relationship that serves as Earp’s reason for undertaking his quest).      

There’s a twist at the end. Of course there is. Doesn’t need to be, but there is. It’s not much of one, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Doesn’t make sense for Earp to know what’s going on, nor does it make sense for him to wait so long to reveal he knows. Consequently, it makes the whole of the movie not make any sense. We’re somehow supposed to believe that events which either involved or were witnessed by dozens of people never became public knowledge, that the story of the end of a notorious criminal’s exploits never went out over telegraph wires and was never printed in any newspaper. Seems a bit strange to build your movie around the idea of a newspaper reporter getting the scoop of his life and then more or less pretend newspapers don’t exist.

I was a bit hasty when I stated the movie offers no surprises. There is one oddball scene in which Earp uses red twine to determine who committed the crime that kicks off the story. I don’t know how it works, but somehow the string allows him to determine exactly who did the shooting and from where. It’s silly, and anachronistic as hell, but how cool would CSI: Cheyenne be?

One last thing: That explosion on the cover art? I don’t know what movie that’s from, but it’s certainly not from this one.       

THE VIDEO

The 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer is uneven, although that unevenness is undoubtedly inherent in the original photography. Shot on digital video, the movie never has a truly film-like look, but some brightly lit exteriors come close. Interiors, on the other hand, often look flat, plastic, and unnatural; one or two are so flat they look more like they were shot on analog video. A short black-and-white sequence that follows the opening credits looks particularly bad, almost like an old over-the-air television broadcast (likely the result of having been shot in color on HD video and then digitally drained and tweaked). Blacks hold up fairly well, but thankfully there aren’t that many dark scenes. Digital noise has been kept to a minimum, but look for it and you’ll find it.

THE AUDIO

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai varieties) is of middling quality. The front-heavy mix sends virtually nothing to the rears, and the dialogue, effects, and music are a little flat; you can hear everything, but it’s all rather bland (there’s also a strange reverb in a few lines of dialogue in one scene). The low end is weak; punches sound more like weak slaps, gunshots more like cap guns being fired at the bottom of a well. English, English SDH, Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai subtitles are available. 

THE EXTRAS

Riding Along With Wyatt Earp (4 minutes) is a worthless behind-the-scenes piece, too short and shapeless to be of any value.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Other than make me wish a good Blu-ray version of Tombstone would hurry up and materialize, Wyatt Earp’s Revenge didn’t do anything for me.