Long after the genre’s heyday, Kevin Costner brought the Western back to the summer movie season
The director-star’s Open Range is a charming callback to oaters of old
Film Lists Kevin Costner
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Against all odds, the event-movie movie season is in full swing, so it’s time once again to look back on unsung summer blockbusters—the flops, the critical bombs, or the merely forgotten Hollywood spectacles that deserve to be rescued from the trash bin of movie history.
Open Range (2003)
Just what is it with Kevin Costner and Westerns? The man has spent a huge chunk of his filmography appearing in them, from his breakthrough performance in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado to his directorial debut with Dances With Wolves (a.k.a. the movie that stole Goodfellas’ Best Picture Oscar) to small-screen productions like the Hatfields & McCoys miniseries and the TV series Yellowstone. Costner’s most recent work from behind the camera belongs to the genre, too. After the dismal success of his expensive post-apocalyptic neo-Western The Postman (which he also directed), he went small, securing just $22 million to adapt Lauran Paine’s The Open Range Men. But even with a modest budget, Costner (working once more with cinematographer J. Michael Muro, who ran Steadicam on Wolves) managed to get his John Ford on, capturing mountains, hillsides, and other vistas with breathtaking awe.
This time around, Costner isn’t the main star; he shares top billing with shit-kicking screen icon Robert Duvall. Costner and Duvall are, respectively, Charley and Boss, open-range cattlemen rustling their herd through the countryside. Their peaceful journey gets interrupted when one of their cowhands is roughed up and detained at a nearby town run by an Irish land baron (a seething Michael Gambon) who can’t stand free grazers. Of course, the baron has the town marshal (James Russo) in his back pocket. Costner and Duvall’s cowboys soon go on the warpath after the baron sends riders to attack their campsite, leaving one cowhand dead and another severely injured.
Range is the sort of old-school Western only Costner seems interested in making anymore. Its tale of vengeful but altruistic gunslingers going up against your standard-issue powerful baddie—who also has an entire town of scared, decent folk under his thumb—resembles the traditional oaters Ford, Henry Hathaway, and Budd Boetticher specialized in. This being a post-Unforgiven Western, there is some genre revisionism, too, with Charley revealed to be a Civil War vet/ex-hired killer still haunted by his years of bloodshed. But the film more closely resembles early 20th-century Westerns in its downright disarming lack of cynicism. Costner and screenwriter Craig Storper give us an old-fashioned story of right versus wrong, where the men with upstanding moral codes do battle with men who lost them a long time ago. And you know those latter gents will get their comeuppance in the climactic gunfight.
Perhaps the most satisfying death in the movie comes when Charley walks up to the sadistic goon (a pre-Sons Of Anarchy Kim Coates) who hurt his pals and pops him straight in the head. (The character only has a few minutes of screen time; Costner practically does the audience a favor by immediately rubbing him out before his shtick goes stale.) But it’s not all vengeance and violence. Costner gives us some moments of quiet affection between Charley and Sue (Annette Bening), the sister of the doctor the men go to for medical attention. Bening’s character is yet another Western archetype: the concerned, resourceful woman who makes a loner cowpoke think about settling down. This earnest, effective trip to the Old West was a small success in the summer of ’03, calling back to an era when blockbusters looked a little different than they do today. So long as there’s still an audience for Westerns, Costner seems happy to keep making them.
Availability: Open Range is available to rent or purchase digitally.
65 Comments
This movie truly is incredible. One of the best westerns ever.
This movie and Broken Trail, I have a real soft spot for even though they are generally not in my “wheel house” per say. I think it is due to my childhood and watching the original Lonesome Dove mini series every damn family vacation when it rained.But Robert Duvall (and Tommy Lee Jones) in a Western, I’ll take it any day of the week!
IMO this is the Dad Movie: two hours of muttering about how age flattens a man followed by twenty minutes of shotgun fightin’.
I generally find age fattens a man rather than flattens, but maybe things were different in the Old West.
Spend that age in the saddle and it will flatten things you didn’t think could flatten.
This is Big Daddy Kane and Billy Baldwin erasure.Edit: Apparently it’s Stephen Baldwin…
Stephen? That’s so much worse!
Costner and Duvall are, respectively, Charley and Boss, open-range cattlemen rustling their herd through the countryside.I need to briefly convey the idea of these characters guiding their cattle across grazing lands. Pretty sure I’ve heard the word ‘rustle’ in relation to cattle before, so I’ll use that. Should I take 11 seconds to look it up and make sure I’m using it correctly?
Oof, yeah that word has a very specific connotation with regard to cattle.
Got oater in there though so high fives abounded, I’m sure.
Costner and Duvall are, respectively, Charley and Boss.You’re so wrong, it’s Charley and Blue Bonnet.
Pretty excellent movie that was a treat to see in the theatres back in my college years. Has some stunning shots that add as much to the experience as Costner having a revival. I wish Duvall had garnered a nomination.This was what I had in mind when I signed up for Peacock to check out Yellowstone. But that show just hasn’t clicked for me.
I remember liking this movie a lot, and the whole thing it was doing was almost comically out of fashion at that point.
It had to have been a long time since any movie used “Let’s rustle up some grub” completely unironically. It’s that kind of movie and god bless it.
This reminds me that I’ve been meaning to watch Silverado again. I love that movie but it’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and watched it through.
Appaloosa is a good one too.
It benefits strongly from having Brian Dennehy as the villain.
It benefits strongly from having Brian Dennehy as the villain.Most things do.
And Jeff Goldblum doing a great heel turn!
Silverado was one of those Kasdan calculated homage to a genre with the best cast available, and it was received as a calculated effort, but I don’t care: it is fun, it looks amazing, and the score is catchy.
The cast is jaw dropping. It even has John Cleese! In a western!
A truly entertaining film.
It’s entertaining, but it’s a little like the White Album in that you could probably cut at least half an hour and two main characters / subplots and make it much stronger, but damned if anyone knows which ones to cut.
See, I love how it’s kind of shaggy and has a bunch of different classic Western archetypes and plots running in tandem. It’s like a Western medley. If you wanted to introduce someone to the concept of a Western, just show them Silverado and you’ve got, like, 80% of the genre covered. You’ve got the “robbed wagon train”, the “guy left for dead in the desert”, the “evil cattle baron going after farmer’s land”, the “long lost son/brother returns to a bad situation”, the “prison break”, the “corrupt criminal Sheriff”, and so on. All they’re missing is “evil savage Indians” which . . . thank god.
Now that I think about it, it’d make a great TV show. You could grab these exact characters and overall plot points and spin it out for five years.
Silverado is too slick for its own good… Appaloosa is a bit grittier
I like Wyatt Earp a lot. A whole lot, in fact. And because we’re required to compare them because they came out so close together, I prefer it to the more action-oriented Tombstone.
Tombstone, great as it is, would have been much better, had Kurt Russell directed the whole thing, as opposed to “ghost” directing it.That said, Costner does Westerns very well. They have always been one of my favorite genres.
What is your opinion on Deep Impact versus Armageddon? Or Volcano versus Dante’s Peak? Or The Abyss vs. Leviathan vs. Deep Star Six? I always was fascinated by these paired movies where it is clear that one studio heard that another studio was making a movie about something and then decided to make their own to compete.
I’ll take Deep Impact over Armageddon any day, though the final asteroid nuke in Armageddon looked pretty cool.
I would take Dante’s Peak against that field. The effects have aged better than most from that era. Small-town mayor/single mom Linda Hamilton, rehearsing what she is going to say as she brings you coffee…The Abyss should have been the best, but that ending. We always called it Deep Star Stupid, so you can cross off that one.
My opinion: I slightly prefer Wyatt Earp to Tombstone (though the second has more action, the final shotdown in Wyatt Earp is wonderful), Dante’s Peak to Volcano (though the second one is even sillier), Armaggedon to Deep Impact (because I cannot believe the melodrama and I never felt comfortable with the ethical answers that drama relies on) and Leviathan (if only for the cast and because it looks cooler)
Tombstone floats on and off my top 10 films, so I prefer it to Wyatt Earp. However, I do love both of them. Deep Impact over Armageddon (though for world Ending Chunks of rock movies, I’d recommend Greenland) Dante’s Peak over Volcano, easy. Leviathan, then Deep Star Six, then The Abyss.
Deep Impact may be be the better movie but when I’m hungover nothing beats Armageddon.
I agree, it is interesting to compare. Capote vs Infamous? Dangerous Liaisons vs Valmont? pop immediately to mind, and there’s a third that won’t quite come to me. I don’t really have a particular opinion on Capote vs Infamous, I don’t remember them that well, but remember I enjoyed them both. And Dangerous Liaisons was one of my favorites, god I loved that movie, but Valmont was incredible too, especially Annette Bening.
Yeah, those are good additions to the list. I saw both Capote and Infamous (I prefer Capote, mostly because of PSH’s performance), but while I’ve seen Dangerous Liaisons multiple times, I’ve never seen Valmont. I should. I remember Siskel & Ebert saying it really gave a different interpretation of the characters.
Valmont of course was of course completely overshadowed by Dangerous Liaisons. I was aware of it, but figured it was probably completely unnecessary and superfluous. It’s not, though, at all. S&E were right, the interpretations and performances were so different – the two films really complement one another. Annette Bening, as I recall, was truly marvelous, and I say that as someone who idolized Glenn Close. This movie and The Grifters are why I have no problem imagining her as Catwoman.
I loved Open Range and remember telling anybody who would listen to go see it while it was still in theaters…This is a seriously gorgeous movie. Costner and the cinematographer had to really be on the same page. The landscape is more than just backgrounds, it becomes integrated into the storytelling in a way that almost makes it a character. There are a handful movies that I loved, loved, loved only to buy later on home video and be seriously disappointed. For example, Heat remains my favorite movie of all time, but I can’t recommend it without the qualification that it is not even really the same movie on video. I don’t think any of Michael Mann’s films are (like also the mega-underappreciated Miami Vice) – and Costner is that sort of director too. I haven’t watched Open Range at home, but I am sure it would still be worth it if you have a big tv- it certainly was memorable in all of its CinemaScope glory.
It’s a weird thing about Westerns. IIRC, they were declared officially dead in the 1980s when The Legend of the Lone Ranger (not the Johnny Depp one) flopped horribly, but it flopped because it was a really horrible movie, not because it was a western. I think a really good Western could’ve done fine, then or any other time.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Lone_RangerIs there any other genre that’s considered all or nothing like that other than Westerns?BTW Deadman (this time the Johnny Depp one) is a great Western.
I don’t think Westerns can ever truly die any more than WWII movies (another genre that was “dead” for a while but seems back again) can. There’s just so much you can do with them and they can reflect whatever the current time is interested in, for example focusing on Black or Asian American experiences in the Old West and WWII.
You know, I have been playing adventure games for 30 years, without stop, and I remember when BROKEN SWORD was released that there were calls about how the adventure games were dying. Same when Grim Fandango was released. And it was the year where more adventure games were actually on the market.I also love drum n bass. It has been declared dead for also 20 years at least, while Calibre has not stopped releasing stuff, Hospital Records got popular and back, the brazillian guys like Dj Marky or Patife did not stop releasing good stuff, and I never stopped going to specific parties.Same with western. It was declared dead in the 80s mostly because spaghetti stopped being so popular (in general Italian cinema faded in the 80s away from its absolute dominance for some reason) but Walter Hill and Kasdan released really popular movies of the kind and both Young Guns were extremely popular. There was more of the action comedy 80s stuff, but there were westerns, totally 80s westerns.
Not really your main point, but while the death of adventure games (in the Sierra/LucasArts sense) twenty years ago in the Broken Sword era was premature, now they really do seem to be dead except for indie games like “Night in the Woods”. In part I think because while it used to be that the only games with stories were adventure games, these days every game seems to have a story even if it is a first-person shooter or a martial arts beat-em-up game, and a lot of people prefer that sort of gameplay over using objects to solve puzzles and were only playing adventure games because they liked the stories.
Yeah, well, could be, but somehow there is always a bunch of new adventure games with objects and puzzles being reviewed in adventuregamers all the time. They don’t reach the mainstream or any indie site (well, nowadays Rock Paper Shotgun is indistinguishable from IGN) but their public is always there. It’s like wargames or space games or plane games.
For a movie few have seen, it has a stacked cast – Depp, Crispin Glover, Billy Bob, Iggy Pop, Robert Mitchum, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Lance Henriksen, Alfred Molina and more. This, as well as ‘Night on Earth’ and ‘Broken Flowers’ are my favorite Jarmusch films.
Pirate movies were similarly “over” after Cutthroat Island was an enormous bomb in 1995, among the biggest losses in history at the box office. Similarly, it’s because the movie was bad, not because the genre was bad – as proven by Pirates of the Caribbean’s success less than a decade later.
That lasted until Pirates of the Caribbean’s third or fourth sequel killed the genre once again.
Agreed. Dead Man is awesome. As was Pale Rider and Unforgiven (and of course the True Grit remake). 3:10 To Yuma (the remake) was pretty decent. . And even though it’s modern, Hell or High Water is perfectly fine being called a Western (I guess it’s neo-Western). And honestly, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is better than people give it credit for. And for cheesy fun, there’s always The Quick and The Dead and Bone Tomahawk.
Open Range is a good movie. I got the DVD when it first came out as I have a soft spot for westerns. the plot is similar to the jack bull, but then again there are a lot of westers where a poor underdog takes on a wealthy adversary abusing their power for personal gain. My only gripe with the movie is the shootout at the end. all the classic action movie blunders. Costner’s character fires his 6 shot revolver about 16 times before reloading, people fly through the air when hit with shot from a shotgun, just the usual careless action movie mistakes.
I am a big fan of Westerns, and this is my favorite modern (post Unforgiven) Western. It is a classicIt is one of those few movies that I went into not knowing anything about it (almost impossible in the internet age). My wife and I were on a date before our kids were born, and on a whim just decided to go see whatever was playing at the theater down the street from the restaurant. It ended up as one of the best movies of that year for me.The great characters and dialogue. Fantastic shots of sweeping plains. A slow burn leading to an explosive gun battle at the end. I loved it all, and have watched the movie multiple times since I saw it in the theater.
Benning plays the doctor’s sister, yes, but you need to mention that the doctor is played by Dean McDermott, before he became mainly known as Tori Spelling’s motorcycle wrecking husband. Newsflash: he’s really a good actor.
while although it does the silly ‘shoot 500 bullets from a 6 shooter without reloading’ thing, i did enjoy the nod to realism with significant portions of the shoot out featuring several people who clearly have no business being in a gun fight shooting at each other from nearly point blank range and not hitting anything
“(a.k.a. the movie that stole Goodfellas’ Best Picture Oscar)“Huh, did not know that. Well, it’s a fair cop.
I saw this in theaters when I was, god, 16? And remember appreciating it a lot. I remember appreciating how quietly it let the scenes with Costner and Bening play out. Mainstream studio fare now doesn’t tend to let a lot go unsaid. It came out a year after Road to Perdition, and both kind of did the highbrow/mid-budget/big star updates on a classic genre movie, just for different genres. There isn’t much surprising in Open Range (again except maybe for the Bening/Costner interplay) but I remember it doing pretty much exactly what it set out to do, and having plenty of beautiful landscape shots.
I will defend to my grave that Kevin Costner is one of the few guys in the current cinema who understands western totally. I am not such a fan of the Wolves one, but The Postman gets the tropes perfectly – I admire it on how it takes themes from the book and transforms them into an epic of the civil servant because civil servants and people make a nation – and Open Range is just glorious. In an era where the videogames only know how to treat western as if the only valid language was the spaghetti one, I love how Costner always worked in a more Mann/Hawks/yes, Ford language.
Yellowstone is patently ridiculous … and I love every moment of it. Really hoping he and Taylor Sheridan work on an old school Western film.
In an era where the videogames only know how to treat western as if the only valid language was the spaghetti one I’ll give RDR 2 at least a little credit for starting to move away from spaghetti western stylings. I think it’s hard to completely do that though because it’s a video game and you’ve got to have plenty of action which means you have to have combat mechanics that let the player rack up a huge body count.
Ahh the olden days, when Costner could command starring roles instead of just being a useless plot point character that dies for no real reason. Save the dog, turn the Kryptonian into a sulking manchild!
This is a great movie, but when I hear the title the first thing I think about, as a Canadian, is Duvall’s comments at the time about how he hated filming in Alberta, Canada. He did not have kind words to say about the location and local actors, as I recall.
Good memory.Specifically, I believe, Duvall’s beef (cattle drive, see what I did there??) was (apparently) with the local crew union (IATSE) and what he considered to be excessive limitations on non-OT hours and breaks (think of James Cameron’s woes shooting in the UK) causing difficulties meeting shooting schedules.
As a native Albertan and former film crew member, this seems odd, since I don’t recall much difference between US and Canadian regulations in this regard.
He may have been just getting his Grump on, who knows.
Nonetheless, fantastic movie, extraordinarily well acted, shot, and scored.(Bonus, one of Diego Luna’s earliest Hollywood outings)
Those free -grazers grew up to be Ammon Bundy.
Probably the thing I loved best about Open Range is that the big gunfight at the end of the movie is played out how I think a “real intown gunfight” would probably actually play out.There’s a bunch of setup with characters hiding weapons throughout the town beforehand, and then there’s a LOT of pausing inbetween a shot or two being fired as characters run and hide, or sneakily move on to their next hidey-hole with the stash of ammo.There’s none of the typical “walking down the middle of the road taking amazing potshots knocking off people one-by-one from rooftops” bravado that you would usually expect to get from a western gunfight.
Agreed. I love that realism so much that I’m still able to enjoy when a blast from a shotgun sends a goon flying a few feet as if he’d been hit by a car. That part may not be realistic, but they earned it by saving up on realism elsewhere, and it looks damn cool.
If anyone cares, golfer Jon Rahm looks like a mashup of Mose and Button.
Many a time I’ve flipped through channels and started watching what I thought was this movie for about 10 minutes before realizing it was the one with Lowell from Wings and Robert Duvall. Similar movies though the latter is not quite as good. However, it did teach me though that Chinese people used to be called “celestials” back in the day.
I just watched 3:10 to Yuma (the Bale/Crowe one) and I enjoyed it. I watched the scene 4 times and I still have no idea why Crowe suddenly decided to get on the train, but I still enjoyed it. I just love me a good western, and i think it’s still a doable genre, Westworld proved that there is still an attraction to the idea of a frontier adventure.
Also, Maverick gets a lot of play in the house.
This is a good movie & a good western. I especially like the staging of the action scenes, how abrupt the gun violence is, I don’t know what other western is quite like that
Two weeks and I’m still greyed? What the jeez?