Sam Raimi’s 1995 western, The Quick and the Dead is the director’s only attempt at the genre.

But sometimes, you only need to do it once!

The Quick and the Dead sees a motley group of gunslingers converging on the town of presumably Arizonian town of Redemption, which is ruled by the villainous former/current outlaw mayor John Herod, played by the superb Gene Hackman who delivers a devilish and threatening performance in the role.

Herod has decided to host a shooting tournament, with the purposes of seeing who the best gunslinger in the area is. The prize — over one hundred thousand dollars!

‘The Lady’, played by Sharon Stone, who delivers a suitably cold and aloof performance, enters the tournament for personal reasons that are made clear as the story progresses; every good western needs a mysterious stranger.

The Quick and the Dead is not the best western ever made, but it doesn’t have to be either. Raimi delivers a fun and different take on the genre, instead of sprawling American landscapes, horses, rustlers, and chasing across hills and flat horizons, we see our heroes all crammed together in the same domicile — having to continuously interact and mingle as the stakes get increasingly higher and tensions rise to boiling point.

The ‘hook’ of the tournament is a great concept to get characters together and create a sense of best camaraderie and friction as we see characters naturally form groups and alliances.

We get a great group of typical western characters including the Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘The Kid’, Russel Crow’s ‘Cort’, Tobin Bell’s ‘Dog Kelly’, Robert Blossom’s ‘Doc Wallace’, Lance Henriksen’s ‘Ace Hanlon’ to name a few.

These characters are bought to life by Simon Moore’s fun and tense script, though the character’s exist mostly (in my opinion, at least) to give Gene Hackman great performers to act against, showing off his chops on-screen (much in the same way as does in Crimson Tide (1995)).

Russel Crow and Leonardo DiCaprio are the two other highlights, acting along Sharon Stone as friends and hopeful lovers (in DiCaprio’s case). Crow’s performance is regretful and subdued, a perfect counterbalance to DiCaprio’s energetic and youthful characterisation of ‘The Kid’.

Raimi inserts some of his classic film-making techniques into the mix, giving us some all time classic western close-up shots, with a tilted zoom. We also get a few great sequences, such as a montage of fighting set against a black backdrop, giving the scene a dream-like sequence that fits the ominous and drunken mood of the film.

The violence is high-impact, but not necessarily ‘gory’, with the crew choosing to use limited squibs and practical blood (one great scene has a blood squirting out of a man as if a vein has been hit and the blood looks great on camera) as well as some digital compositing/CGI for the higher impact kills (bullets through heads etc) which have a Raimi flair to them.

Raimi keeps the suspense high throughout the entire picture, but there’s one scene which to me stands taller than the rest: a scene in which Hackman delivers a monologue in a dinner sequence opposite Sharon Stone, where both the dialogue and the scene itself could have come from a Coen brothers movie. Hackman is believable and for my money, delivers an all-time great ‘outlaw’ performance.

4/5

Callum Berry.