Film

Open Range

Name: Open Range
Genre: Western
Released: 2003
Cast: Kevin Costner, Robert Duvall, Annette Bening, Michael Gambon, Michael Jeter

A patient, unfashionably decent western about two drovers who just want to be left alone and the corrupt town that won't let them. Costner and Duvall move slow, talk slower, and then the violence, when it comes, is loud and messy and over fast. Gorgeous, unhurried, a little old-fashioned on purpose — for people who like their gunfights to cost something.

TMDb rating

7.2

If you liked this

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The definitive 'retired gunslinger pulled back into violence' film, and the one every modern western is quietly arguing with. Eastwood strips away the myth and shows you what killing actually looks like.

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Lonesome Dove

Robert Duvall again, this time in a four-part miniseries so beloved it basically reset what a TV western could be — funny, sprawling, and devastating by the end.

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If you want the swagger and quotable machismo that Open Range mostly withholds, this is the release valve — Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer chewing scenery in the best way.

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Same exact skeleton — reluctant gunfighter, corrupt land baron, a family that needs protecting — but told fifty years earlier, more mythic and less bloody.

The template Open Range is quietly remaking: a weary gunman drawn into defending homesteaders against a cattle baron's hired guns, shot in gorgeous Technicolor Wyoming.

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The Outlaw Josey Wales1976no page yet

Eastwood directing and starring as a man trying to disappear from violence who can't quite manage it — the same weary morality, twenty-seven years earlier.

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Costner again, this time directing himself in an epic about a soldier going native — same love of vast plains and slow-building trust.

But Three hours long and considerably more romantic about the frontier than Open Range ever allows itself to be.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird2008

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