Stealth Entertainment: The Quick and the Dead
By Scott Lumley
November 13, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com

See? She's hot when she's not talking.
Hollywood is a machine. Every week, every month and every year countless films are released into theatres and not every one is as successful as the studio heads would hope. Sometimes the publicity machine was askew, sometimes the movie targeted an odd demographic, sometimes the release was steamrolled by a much larger movie and occasionally the movie is flat out bad.

But Hollywood's loss is our gain. There is a veritable treasure trove of film out there that you may not have seen. I will be your guide to this veritable wilderness of unwatched film. It will be my job to steer you towards the action, adventure, drama and comedy that may have eluded you, and at the same time, steer you away from some truly unwatchable dreck.

Hopefully we'll stumble across some entertainment that may have slid under your radar. Wish us luck.

The Quick and the Dead (1995)

Okay, here we go. If you want Stealth Entertainment, this film is it. The Quick and the Dead is so far under the radar that nobody even thinks about it any more. And that's a shame, because while this is not a great movie, or even a good one, it does a couple of things really well that instantly slide it right into the "Memorable" column.

First of all, there's the cast, which is completely nuts. The Quick and the Dead stars Sharon Stone as "Lady", Leonardo DiCaprio as "The Kid" Fee Herod, Russel Crowe as Cort, Gene Hackman as bad guy John Herod, Tobin Bell as Dog Kelly, Lance Henrikson as Ace Hanlon and Gary Sinise as The Marshall.

This casting list is completely crazy. That's a lot of star power for what is essentially a throwaway feminist western. Secondly, none of these guys were reigned in at all by the director. Everyone in this film chewed the scenery so hard you would have thought the set designer built the town out of meat and the actors were all piranhas. The only actor in the whole pack who even tried to be professional was Hackman, who played a character who was nothing more than a relentlessly selfish prick with as much self control as he could muster. Hackman radiates menace in this film in a way that astounds me. Not many actors could do what he did with this role, and he does it effortlessly.

You certainly can't say that about Sharon Stone in this film, as she plays "Lady" so badly that you've probably seen better performances in your local high school production of Hamlet. You could almost call her acting "wooden" and "amateurish", but that would probably be construed as an insult to trees, amateurs, and possibly amateur trees.

And then there are the action scenes in this film, almost all of them one on one gunfights in the street. They're gleefully over-the-top and done in defiance of logic and physics. During one of his gunfights, John Herod shoots the thumb off of one of his opponents, something I've never heard of happening. A couple of fights later he tortures one crippled opponent with a few shots before he dispatches him with a bullet to the head that leaves an exit wound the size of a grapefruit. During the climax scene, Cort wields two pistols and dispatches bad guys with shots over the shoulder and behind his back, an act made even more impressive with the broken fingers he is sporting thanks to the beating he took the night before.

None of it makes a lick of sense, especially in the age of Mythbusters and Discovery Channel, but despite the horrible performances and the completely unbelievable gunfights, this is just an entertaining film to watch. I credit the cinematographer and the director (Sam Raimi) in this case, as it appears early on that they knew this film was going to be terrible, so they just rolled with it and tried to make it more than the sum of its parts. And to be honest, they really did succeed.

The plot in this film is pretty much nonexistent. It's a revenge story - that much is obvious - but as the movie rolls along and you see why Lady is out for blood, you can't help but wince. It's a cruel, cold moment that the child actor playing a younger Lady did quite well. Lady takes advantage of a gunfighter's tournament run every year in the town that Herod rules with an iron fist and enters so she can get a shot at killing Herod. When she arrives, she isn't deemed much of a threat by the pack of gunfighters, killers, lunatics, preachers and Swedes. (Yes, I said Swedes. You don't think they had guns in Sweden?)

While Lady is angling to find a way into the tournament, Herod has his pack of bandits kidnap Cort, a former accomplice and bandit who used to ride with Herod. Cort has forsaken his gunslinging ways and is trying to redeem himself by working as a preacher. Herod is offended by Cort's transformation, because if Cort feels he doesn't have to be a killer, then maybe what Herod is doing is wrong. Herod tries to prove his point by thrusting the kidnapped Cort into the tournament, hoping that by forcing Herond to kill, he can prove his "once a killer, always a killer" theory.

And the tournament itself is just a great plot device for this movie. Nothing builds up the intimidation factor of a good guy or a bad guy by having them kill numerous, nameless yet colorful bad guys as they work their way through the ranks of the tourney. By the time the final confrontation rolls around, both Herod and Cort seem practically invincible.

The ending is almost ruined by a cheesy little twist near the end, and watching Lady stride down the street yet again dressed like a cowgirl fantasy in a '90s hair band video will very nearly ruin the whole thing for you. However, it's not the ending that you'll watch to enjoy in this film. It will be Hackman playing Herod like a complete bastard. It's the beautiful job that Dante Spinotti does with his camerawork. It's the fleshed out and colorful thugs who are slaughtered wholesale during the tournament. It's any number of little things that provide great entertainment in this film.

The Quick and the Dead is a guilty pleasure. It's a borderline terrible film with great moments that was shot by a really talented cinematographer. If anybody competent had been cast in Sharon Stone's role, this film could have gone an entirely different direction. But she was cast in it, so we're stuck with what we have, which is a pile of great moments cobbled together in an otherwise terrible movie.

Go watch it, you'll see what I mean. There are literally flashes of brilliance all over the place in the Quick and the Dead, you just have to ignore Sharon Stone a lot to see them.