YOUNG GUNS (1988) **1/2 Most of the film suffers from devoutly marketing sensibilities: the boys' hair is kept neat for female viewers, and there's just enough routine violence to keep the guys interested. Now we got 'em all, right?! Emilio Estevez captures the peripheral insanity, and sense of righteous indignation, that fuels any terrorist/revolutionaries (think George Washington, Andreas Baader, Mao, Hitler, Bobby Sands, Stalin, Havel...there's not a lot of common ground between 'em, but they were all really pissed off!), which is about what there is for you to hang your hat on. Kiefer Sutherland's character seems like he's in entirely the wrong picture. But that's all fine, there's more legend to it than anything else, and a lot of folks in the "real" world also seem hopelessly misplaced at their station in life. Kiefer's romantic burblings are close to unbearable, but seem like something akin to poetic and sincere when compared to Lou Diamond Phillips' discourse on the plight of the Indians. It's all true, of course, which makes the abject hokiness of presentation that much more offensive. So then, just when you've written it all off as not very good, Christopher Cain suddenly drops the glamour shots and the crappy rock music, and delivers an absolutely gritty and enthralling (that's right, I said "enthralling") climax full of fury and movement and guts and exactly the kind of desperation that the film should have been looking for all along. The scene is carried by Estevez' sense that gunfights are all in good fun, entirely disassociated from, much less filtered through, his core belief that all this killing is necessary for good to prevail. The closing coda ensures that there can be no sequel, but that was before they saw the box office receipts.
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