Unforgiven

Rating:
Summary: A First-Rate Movie That Just Happens To Be A Western
Review: Unforgiven is a strong, bleak movie. It's also a credit to Clint Eastwood's self confidence as a producer/director and ability as an actor that he cast Gene Hackman in such a showy role and then was able to stand up to Hackman's performance. For me, it was those two heavy-weight performances, balancing each other, that gave the movie its energy.

However, like so many movies today, it is lo-o-ong. I think it could have lost 20 minutes and been an even better movie, just by trimming a minute or two, or more, from almost every scene.

I'm not sure how vital the Morgan Freeman role is to the movie, other than providing a kind of weary humanity. He provides the excuse for Eastwood to throw off the skin of good citizen that his wife made him wear and become the killer he always was, but I think almost anything could have been used to do that. Without Freeman, I could see Little Bill bringing the madam and the scar-faced prostitute to the bar to once and for all find out where Eastwood and the kid are. They are secretly followed by one of the other prostitutes. Little Bill hits them a few times while his pals watch, then the madam loses her temper and refuses to be intimidated anymore by Little Bill's bullying. She attacks him verbally and accuses him in front of the others of being impotent whenever he has sneaked into the whorehouse. This enrages Little Bill. He grabs his whip and beats them to death in a pscho-sexual rage. The more he beats them the more he sweats and gets red in the face. It obvious he's having a sexual release while he's hitting them. Even his pals are uneasy and finally pull him away. The prostitute who had been secretly watching is horrified and scared to death. She knows where Eastwood is and goes to find him. Eastwood had sympathy for the madam and the other prostitute; he saw them as life's losers just as he was. And he decides to hell with trying to play by the rules. He mounts up and heads for the show down.

I'm only half joking. Some sort of sexual inadequacy would help explain Little Bill's character and his need to be the alpha male. I can't remember if there was any explanation for Little Bill's behavior other than that he was just a bad guy.

I think Unforgiven deserved the acclaim it received, and certainly Eastwood did.

Rating:
Summary: Unforgiven
Review: This movie has the whole package. If you love westerns, then this one goes to the top of the list. This is a MUST OWN, and a TRUE CLASSIC. The acting, directing, story, scenery is all A+. You can't help but like Eastwood's character and are eager to see him and Morgan Freeman ride off together to collect their last bounty. Gene Hackman's lawman is both calculating and chilling. Eastwood leaves a true legacy with this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Western!!!!!
Review: If anybody has doubt as to Clint Eastwood's range of characters in regard to Westerns, look no further. Many just think of the tobacco-spitting stranger in "Good, the Bad, & the Ugly", but here Clint shows a more human character in William Munny. This is a former murderer transformed by his dead wife into a family man.

Complications arise when William goes on a journey with his former gunslinger friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) to hunt down rapists for a reward. Along the way, William talks regrettably of his dark days as a killer saying he will never become wicked since they're just doing this one job. However, after Ned is murdered and William picks up the bottle, all hell breaks loose. He guns everyone down and delivers some memorable lines.

This film is not to be missed!!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Eastwood's Disturbing Farewell to the Western
Review: In Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" (1992), there is no ethical code associated with the classic Western, no simple moral of good versus evil. It is an unromanticized depiction of the West in which every bullet -- and every death -- has meaning. "Unforgiven" is a culmination of the dark themes that director Eastwood has explored in "High Plains Drifter" (1973) and "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976). He pays homage to the stark poetry of the Western while staking his own territory of uncompromised reality. The distortion of justice in "Unforgiven" is reminiscent of the tragic, wrongful hanging in director William Wellman's "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943) -- both films confront the horrible consequences of murder and how the killers must live with it. In his final Western, Eastwood shows that the genre can be given new life through provocative explorations of myth and legend, along with an intelligent script and sensitive direction. If each decade of the 21st century can produce a film as significant as "Unforgiven," the Western will endure.

Rating:
Summary: I can't forgive Clint Eastwood for pussifying the west
Review: This movie is so slow moving, I wouldn't recommend it to an insomniac for fear that even he could not remain awake. This sad excuse for a tale of western action and drama falls far short of anyone's expectations for an Oscar caliber film.
My primary complaint is the lack of action. Throughout the movie I found myself waiting in vain for bloody death, when all i received was a few quick and conservative deaths.
Secondly, the geriatric cast seemingly had difficulty with the scenes involving weapons, as the action crawled to a near stop at the moivie's climax. Even the most devoted of western movie fans with impeccable concentration will find himself fidgeting in his seat as the bullets go flying by, ONE AT A TIME, seldom hitting any target.
The cinematography was painfully disruptive as one scene in particular continually switched from glaringly bright to dismally black so quickly that my retinas still are recovering from the shock.
Finally, the writing so terribly sappy and predictable, that I could have sworn the writer was trying to disappoint the audience with tacky lines and dismal revelation. I swear to you that if you choose to watch this movie, you will fall impotent and sterile; may God have mercy on your soul.

Rating:
Summary: The Wild West Was a Bad Place
Review: In the twilight of Clint Eastwood's career an epiphany came to him. The western types that he played in most of his films were essentially bad people. This film is something of an atonement for those films. His character, William Munney, after a life as a killer, is amidst his new life following the death of his sainted wife as an unsuccessful farmer. Word comes to him that in a nearby town that a prostitute was mutilated by a some cowhands and a reward is being offered by her co-workers for the murder of the cowpokes. Munney rationalizes taking up this offer by thinking that these boys are vicious and deserve to die and that doing so would not make him a bad man. Before Munney can collect his reward, though, he has to get through the peace-loving sheriff, Little Bill, who will make sure nobody collects on the reward no matter how many beatings he has to administer. The cynic could say that Eastwood made his bread and butter off violent western types and this is an attempt to cater to politically correct types. I give Eastwood the benefit of the doubt here because this may be the best performance of his career and this film is so well crafted. Gene Hackman is more than his equal as the sadistic sheriff. The beauty of the western is that it is always being re-evaluated and this film stands at the top of the list of great westerns.

Rating:
Summary: A Great, Perhaps the Greatest, Western
Review: In Big Whisky, Wyoming, Delilah, a prostitute, is disfigured in a knife attack. Her fellow prostitutes, disgusted when the sheriff, Little Bill, lets the perpetrator, Mike and his partner Davey, go with a hefty fine, club together with their savings to offer a reward to whoever kills the two cowboys. Word comes of this to Bill Munney, once a hellraising gunslinger, now trying to life a decent life as a pigfarmer. Tempted by the prospect of a share of 1000 dollars he teams up with his old partner Ned and the youthful and immature `Schofield Kid'. Little Bill meantime has heard about the bounty and, determined to keep order, bans firearms from the town and subjects the first shooter to turn up looking interested, the arrogant "English Bob", to what is intended as an exemplary beating and humiliation. But Bill, Ned and the Kid are coming anyway...

I don't tend to much like Westerns but make an exception for very good ones and this is perhaps the best there is. Only `High Noon' perhaps compares and on balance I think I prefer the moral ambivalence and complexity of this to the stark moral simplicity of `High Noon'. Certainly it's Eastwood's masterpiece, a dark epic study of vengefulness and the price to be paid for it.

Nobody in the movie is all that wicked and the events that unfold have a genuinely tragic sombreness. Thus Little Bill, in his leniency to Mike and Davey, protests, "Hell, Alice, it ain't like they were tramps, or loafers or bad men, you know there were just hard working boys who were foolish. If they was given over to wickedness in a regular way then I could see..." which is complacent of course but not so unreasonable, especially as regards the wholly innocent Davey who tried to restrain his friend. A little later, Davey turns up with a pony as a piece offering to Delilah but her friends chase him away with contempt and rage while Delilah's pained face tell us pretty clearly she'd just as soon take the pony and let the matter rest. By the end of the movie they indeed seem just foolish young men who have had to much to drink and been very stupid, not deserving of the squalid ignominious deaths that turn out to await them. Little Bill too, is not so bad, just some guy who wants a quiet life to pursue his incompetent passion for carpentry, but is convinced - by no means unreasonably - that hired killers and assassins are the lowest form of human life and determined that they kept out of his community by any means however brutal. Bill Munney of course was once a thoroughly nasty character but has made genuine efforts to turn himself around and is only tempted back to killing by poverty and the apparent justice of the vengeful mission (The version of the assault on Delilah he hears from the Kid is wildly exaggerated.) The only really wholly unsympathetic character is English Bob and the episode involving him is somewhat off on its own, a darkly semi-comic sub-story apart from the main action. What results is a film of almost Homeric poignancy about the ultimate futility of violence and rage and the emptiness of revenge. I know few films that so consistently refuse to shed their interest on repeated viewings.

The film is flawlessly put together, written and photographed. The acting is superb. Eastwood and Hackman each gives the performances of a lifetime as Munney and Little Bill respectively. Freeman is characteristically solid as Ned, Patroclus to Eastwood's Achilles. And Richard Harris is splendidly obnoxious as English Bob.

(Jaimz Woolvett is excellent too as the Kid, a character redeemed in the end by the very rapid growing up he does once he has seen what killing is really about. Before this, he is a wonderfully stupid, short-sighted, illiterate, half-witted little pipsqueak, swaggering around posturing as a cowboy, off on his half-baked righteous mission for vengeance and justice - though with a fat paycheck as his main incentive - but without the first clue what he is getting into. A truly prophetic character then, being as he is an almost perfect dramatic representation of George W. Bush.)


Rating:
Summary: Decent But Overrated
Review: Clint Eastwood's 1992 somewhat apologetic western on crime and justice in the Old West. Although well acted with good direction, the film lags in its rather predictable plot and suffers from uninspiring action scenes.

The film starts with the senseless mutilation of a prostitute in the town of Big Whiskey. Anxious to keep the peace, Sheriff Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman) asks the perpetrator to compensate the victim with several horses. Humiliated and permanently disfigured, the prostitute isn't happy with the offer and raises a bounty for the death of her attacker. With news of the bounty, widowed Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood) leaves his family behind to get some badly needed money. A retired gunslinger left with a delapidated farm and a bleak future for his two children, Bill Munny returns to his life of sin one last time. He soon joins up with his old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) who's also leaving his reformed life for one final reward. On their way to Big Whiskey, Munny and Logan are joined by The Shofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvet), a young hothead who also needs the reward. When the characters arrive in Big Whiskey, they run into gunslingers such as English Bob (Richard Harris)and the impatience of Sheriff Little Bill. Wanting to keep the peace at all costs, the sheriff will do whatever it takes to keep hired guns out of Big Whiskey. An unexpected incident leads to a final confrontation between the main characters.

Eastwood attempts several things in this film with mixed success. First, he attempts to break away from the reverse trends in westerns he himself helped form over 30 years before in Sergio Leone's action-packed films. In those films, the West was depicted as a wasteland of shady characters who could be either villains or heroes depending on the reward: the theme was presented through symbolic action sequences as opposed to extended and unrealistic dialogues using action as only the filler scenes. In this film, Eastwood sacrifices action for more character study found in some of the older westerns preceding Leone's: the main difference being that characters' motivations are treated with much more realism than those presented in such earlier films. In this film, Eastwood shows that all of the characters are flawed in various ways. The bounty hunters don't really care if their cause is just as long as the reward is payed; they simply justify their motivations post factum. The sheriff is a man with honest intentions and his actions, although perhaps varying between inadequate and extreme, are solely in the interests of the community. All of the characters are victims of their environment who must cope with the realities they are presented with. Even the actual victim in the film, the prostitute, is depicted as a person who suffered from the consequences of her own immoral profession as opposed to the actions of a deranged criminal.

Although this is a good film, I found it to be overrated and actually less creative than Clint Eastwood's other great western, 'The Outlaw Josey Wales.' I felt that the latter actually had more character insight and thematic depth than this film even though it didn't have as many stars. In his attempt to be more sober in portraying the real West, Clint Eastwood seemed to fall in the same trap as earlier westerns by drowning the plot in over-the-top character/psychological studies of people who, realistically, weren't the types to intellectualize things too much. Although I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood's westerns, this is one which I haven't bothered to buy for the reasons cited: I think it tends to make a better rental.