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BY TOM MEEK
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Kevin Costner saddles up again as director and righteous avenger in the law-starved West. He seems obsessed with stretching the straightforward theme of disenfranchisement into an epic odyssey; it worked in Dances with Wolves, but here there’s not enough meat on the spit. We get some gorgeous panoramic shots and fraternal banter from a quartet of freegrazers (cowboys who drive their cattle across the unclaimed plains), each of whom is running from a troubled past. Former hired gun Charley Waite (Costner) hangs dutifully at the side of the group’s patriarch, Boss Spearman (a cagy Robert Duvall). They get into a territorial grudge with a tyrannical cattle baron (Michael Gambon) and when that escalates to murder, a reluctant Charley (in an obvious nod to Shane) must strap on the guns to exact justice. When the bullets finally do fly, Costner the director forsakes Hollywood convention and renders the big shootout as a clumsy, drawn-out ordeal; the sequence’s grim authenticity is riveting. Annette Bening adds a touch of civility as the love interest, and the pounding storm that precedes the final conflict takes on a role of its own. (135 minutes).
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