The death of the west has been a major theme as long as there have been, well, westerns. Even when the genre was in its heyday, cowboys liked to look mournfully off into the sunset and muse about how one day their lifestyle would be no more. The fact is that the western isn’t dead; anyone so inclined can just go out and make one, and a decent one at that. It does, however, seem to be going through something of an identity crisis, and movies like Deadly Shooter sure don’t help. After Clint’s best days in the saddle were behind him, the west seemed to move in a few different directions: the edgy (Deadwood) and the sentimental (Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman) being foremost among them. They both have pitfalls of their own, but they’re distinctly flavorless when mixed, which feels like an almost too-kind appraisal of Shooter.
Deadly Shooter opens with the obligatory lone man in the saddle (Michael Dudikoff) coming upon a woman being stripped of her clothes and flogged in the middle of the desert by a clan of Central Casting roughnecks. Voiceover narration informs us that the man’s name is Michael Atherton, and he proceeds to use his lethal shooting ability to gun down the men holding the woman (Valerie Wildman), later revealed to be, of course, a prostitute. Further complicating matters is the fact that all of the men that Atherton just killed were the kin of Jerry Krants (William Smith), the small town’s obligatory evil patriarch with considerably more power than the sheriff. Krants captures and tortures Atherton, but the lone rider manages to escape, and shack up with that prostitute whose life he had saved. He just might be off the hook, if not for old acquaintance Kyle (Randy Travis) being in town with an old vendetta to settle against him.
It feels oddly fitting to review The Manchurian Candidate in the same week as this, as that film features (in Frank Sinatra) one of the most successful music-to-film crossovers, while this features what well may be one of the least. Randy Travis made his fortune on the back of “Forever and Ever Amen,” perhaps the Midwestern wedding anthem of the early 1990s. It’s certainly a very nice song, but it has about as much in common with the genre known as ‘outlaw country’ as the hokey pokey. Consequently, Travis possesses about as much on screen menace as an unopened bag of Quaker oatmeal (or opened for that matter). But he at least has some sense of finely poised presence, which can hardly be said for his costars. While most of them are given relatively little time to languish in supporting roles, Dudikoff perhaps leaves the biggest gap, his suitably tarnished features and blond hair suggesting perhaps a rugged farmhand, but betraying none of the swagger or stoicism required of a leading man. Even as he is being tortured, he seems like he would be more at home on a California beach than riding a horse absolutely anywhere.
But rather than diminish the film around them, these two lacking performances serve only to illustrate the deficiencies of the film around them, which can be summed up in a single word: inauthenticity. The sets and the costuming (not to mention the acting) suggest a western re-enactment that would perhaps air on the PAX network, which is not to say that that in and of itself is bad, but that it suggests a certain vision of the west best carried off by figures like John Wayne and Henry Fonda, with a chipper spirit that (unfortunately) largely seemed to vanish once The Wild Bunch happened. Therefore, when a level of violence that suggests the film-makers saw Unforgiven shows up, it’s not so much shocking as oddly incorrect, as if the movie had simply made a mistake that you wait for the rest of its running time for it to correct. It never gets corrected, though it’s hard to say that anything is lost. If it was clear what type of film the director and writer originally wanted to make, it would be easier to point out its inadequacies and figure out where the problem lies. But since it’s not, Deadly Shooter makes the shallowest of impacts, one that you would probably find yourself forgetting before the film was even over.
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES
None.
"Deadly Shooter" is on sale May 17, 2011 and is rated R. Western. Directed by Fred Olen Ray. Written by Tony Giglio. Starring Randy Travis, Michael Dudikoff, William Smith, Valerie Wildman.
