Kevin Costner likes an overly-long western weve all worked that out by now. In fact, he likes an overly-long western almost as much as he likes post-apocalyptic dross. So its no major shockerooney that Open Range, his fourth and most recent attempt at mastering this directors chair malarkey (if you count his uncredited work on Waterworld), is a bloated, two-hour-plus cowboy movie.
Its the wild wild west, and chewed-up free-grazing cow-pokes Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charley Waite (Costner) find themselves on the wrong side of crooked rancher Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon) when their herd of milkers winds up on his land. Before long Baxter and an equally-bent sheriff (James Russo) are up to all sorts of dirty tricks in an attempt to drive this couple of wrinklies out of the vicinity and it looks like our weather-beaten heroes will need to start taking the law into their own hands if theres to be any justice in these here parts.
Its a decent enough story, and its padded out by a believable if uninspiring romance between Costner and the customary local singleton (played with a look of slight boredom by Annette Bening). But why Cozzers forces the thing to drag on for quite so long is simply beyond this critics comprehension. It moves at a snails pace, and suffers from total overkill on the emotional speech front (I lost count of the number of times the camera gradually moved on Duvall as he recited yet ANOTHER piece of sagely advice about the true meaning of friendship or the love of a good woman) What should have been a reasonably entertaining western with some nice scenery and a decent shoot-out climax turns into nothing more than a complete and utter chore to watch.