To watch The Quick and the Dead is to embrace in pure pulp from one of Hollywood’s greatest pulp veterans, Sam Raimi – switching gears for the Western with an all-star cast. Sharon Stone, young Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s a black comedy that benefits entirely from director of photography, Dante Spinotti, working behind the camera to aid Raimi’s direction – this looks like a blazing western of old from start to finish, above and beyond the other ’90s westerns, so uniquely different from a genre that many had declared dead until the early 2010s revival. It was very much in fact – alive and kicking – clocking in at a tight timeframe, one hour and forty-five minutes, it’s a breezy watch – and provides endless entertainment from rewatching.
The film benefits from the lure of watching its all-star cast lineup to take shots at each other in turn. You have Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, playing the Mayor of the Old Western Town, Herod – redemption; formerly an outlaw, creating a fast-draw single elimination tournament with rules that are as follows: any contestant may challenge another player, at any time – and no contestant can refuse a challenge. The end only happens if one of them yields, or one of them dies. The prize? A large sum of money – tempting to Stone’s “The Lady” – a famed gunslinger who adds an extra dimension to the plot of The Quick and the Dead – Stone’s chemistry with DiCaprio is good, and DiCaprio’s The Kid shows signs of early charm that would go onto make him a megastar, this is pre-Titanic DiCaprio but every bit as confident as post-Titanic DiCaprio, believing that he himself has a shot against his opponent – Herod, who he believes he is his father and can earn his respect by winning. The Kid hasn’t thought it through – he will have to kill his father to win.
The stakes are high, and they are personal, and it is the best kind of revenge drama. It’s ultimately good old-fashioned fun – the isolated town of Redemption exists as a character in itself, calling back the timeframes of Ford or Hawkes, an open expansionist western far more sprawling of its mostly one locale setting than its setting suggests. This is the Wild West feeling alive and lived in in a way like no other – the flm captures the themes of the Dollars trilogy in broad scopes but feels almost like what you’d expect from an American remake of Leone’s magnum opus, romantic and inspired – perhaps overly cliched in its approach, even if the western genre has been done to death by this point the stories of The Kid and The Lady feel very much ones that have been told over and over again, but it’s the edge of DiCaprio and Stone – in an incredibly underrated performance, despite the Saturn Award for Best Actress Nomination that she received that year, really owns the western stage and deserved a higher profile role; a breath of fresh air in a male dominated genre.
On top of all of this we even get Russell Crowe before Russell Crowe became Russell Crowe in Gladiator; Raimi’s eye for identifying talent second to none. Had this film come out ten years later, in 2005, it would be a lot higher regarded than it was before Gladiator and Titanic. Crowe is good – and above it all, capable of going toe to toe with the villainous Hackman. For Herod, it would be most actors’ greatest performances of their career, but for Hackman – it’s just another role, able to take a chilling villain and make him feel like a real, credible threat at every turn, bringing a touch of cartoonish extravaganza to the role that still makes him incredibly threatening at the same time – there are few other actors capable of finding that fine balance between fun and scary, and Hackman is one of those actors.
Raimi has never been a director to limit himself to one genre – his horror film origins in Evil Dead are pre-The Quick and the Dead, his venture into Spider-Man afterwards, but you can see the wheels turning here, this is the bridge between the gap – he’s having fun with his dutch angles and creating gun-tooting action that just feels like it exists to have fun. It’s a revisionist western in the sense that it’s not another Ford; but neither should it have to be – for all its reliance on the cliches it’s a testament to the versatility of Raimi as a genre director – you can see him creating incredibly innovative camera shots that lesser directors would shy away from. The tournament set-up restricts the film to a touch of predictability and genre confines – had it been wilder; there would have been perhaps more unpredictability early on – but it never stops the actors relishing in their roles of the central quartet – Hackman, Stone, DiCaprio and Crowe all showing signs of stardom.
It shows that you don’t ultimately need the strongest of plots to make a captivating movie and The Quick and the Dead manages to grab you and hold your attention from start to finish. Raimi playing around in the spaghetti western genre and having a great time – the visuals are among the real highlight here of this piece and his camerawork is peak trademark Raimi – snap zooms, reverse shots likely to give you vertigo, reverse dolly shots, everything designed to drag this film from the ordinary procedural it could’ve been into something new and full of life. If this is a homage to Sergio Leone – it might just be the best one.
The Quick and the Dead is streaming for free on Vizio’s WatchFree+ in January.
Learn more about how to stream it at the Vizio website.
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