Review of Young Guns (1988) by Edith N — 03 Aug 2008

It isn't actually incompatible for Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez) to be portrayed as both a raving psychopath and a man avenging a father figure. (Well--Tunstall was apparently much younger than Terrence Stamp. But anyway.) After all, Tunstall gave him things. Tunstall treated him like a good person. The death of Tunstall [i]inconvenienced[/i] Billy the Kid, and he couldn't be having with that, now, could he?

John Tunstall owned a ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico. He hired a bunch of young men of questionable background, and his newest hire goes by the name of William H. Bonney, though of course it wasn't really his name. (True. Billy the Kid's real name was Henry McCarty.) There are other businessmen in the area with great dislike of Tunstall and his men. They kill him, leading those young men of questionable background to go on the warpath. They get themselves deputized by a justice of the peace, and they go after the men they know to have killed Tunstall. This becomes an orgy of violence; there's also a peyote binge.

We get a chance to see some of the insanity of Billy the Kid here. He liked killing people. He wanted the list of people he killed to be as long as possible. Hells, he [i]goaded[/i] people into provoking him to kill them. The real Billy the Kid apparently once threw bullets into a campfire just to mess with his fellow Regulators. This Billy the Kid giggles unpleasantly as he shoots up a bucket the others are standing near. He was not a good guy. He was not glamorous, though of course having him portrayed by Emilio Estevez changes that some. Yes, he was going after those who had killed his employer. But he liked to, and he had a gold-plated excuse.

This is one of the handful of films wherein Martin's boys are together, and their characters have the biggest antagonism of any pair who aren't actually shooting at one another. At that, they come close, even though they're ostensibly on the same side. You see, Sheen's Dick Brewer really wants to obey the law. He really wants to bring men to justice. One suspects that he thinks that just shooting them would make him as bad as they are, and he's too lawful good to have that. Kiefer Sutherland as "Doc" Surlock and Lou Diamond Phillips as "Jose" Chavez y Chavez (no, I don't know why IMDB puts it in quotation marks, either) are also more complex characters than the bad '80s nature of the film might lead one to expect.

It's still not really a good movie, though it's not actually a bad one, either. There are some decent performances, though others are overblown. Jack Palance does a decent enough villain, as per usual. And, yes, most of the stars are attractive young men. Then again, it's why they were cast.