Unforgiven sucks. There, I said it.

Once upon a time, I held fast to the notion that I didn’t like movie westerns. I don’t know why, I just assumed I didn’t. I’d seen Tombstone, which sort of counts, but I didn’t love it as much as my friends. I mean, it has Val Kilmer dying of tuberculosis and Kurt Russel sporting a killer mustache, and that’s about all it has going for it. I didn’t hate the movie, but the fact that I had to google it to remember that Kurt Russel was the star in the first place should tell you the impression it made on me. And that was the only western I’d ever managed to watch, unless you count that one episode of Star Trek:TNG where Data has tits.

And then, a friend made me watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Holy. Shit.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is quite possibly one of the coolest movies ever made. Not westerns, movies. It deserves more praise than I’m going to give it here, but I seriously felt shamed into thinking I was above the entire genre.  Good is actually the third in what’s known as director Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars trilogy’, starting with A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, all starring Clint Eastwood as ‘The Man with No Name’ (or Joe…whatever). I was finally able to catch all three thanks to the awesomeness that is HDNet Movies (seriously, if I ever meet Mark Cuban, it will be hard for me not to hug him).  And they’re all great!

Also, he has so much money at the end of all three movies.

Know what else HDNet is playing this month? Unforgiven. “Of course!” I thought. “What a great chaser to Sergio Leone’s classic trilogy! It’s directed by Clint Eastwood himself, and surely he picked up some of Leone’s greatness. It even won the Oscar for Best Picture, and the Academy never picks overrated, bloated, preachy movies for Best Picture. Right? Right??”

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is nearly three hours long, and deservedly so — it’s a motherfucking epic. Unforgiven is just over two hours, feels like four, and could have been shortened to about forty minutes. The film kicks into action* when a group of hookers pool their money to put a hit out on a tiny-peckered asshole who cut up one of their own. They also put out a hit on his friend, who actually tried to stop the assault, presumably because they’re stupid whores. Gene Hackman is the town’s hardass sheriff who doesn’t want any murders on his watch. Also, he is building a house.

*note: very little in this movie can be considered action in the traditional meaning of the word when applied to westerns

Clint Eastwood, meanwhile, is a reformed gunman and outlaw turned family man, literally wallowing in pig shit when an annoying Little Shit shows up and tells him about the bounty. Clint says he’ll consider it and sends the Little Shit on his way, considers it for about three seconds, then rounds up long-in-the-tooth former partner in crime Morgan Freeman to come with him to collect the bounty. There. I just told you THE FIRST FUCKING HOUR OF THE MOVIE. That’s it. That’s ALL THAT HAPPENS.

Even his horse sucks in this movie.

Things look like they might get interesting for a while, with the arrival of ‘English Bob’, a gunfighter employed by the railroad to shoot the Chinese, for whatever reason. As he rants about the shooting of President Garfield and is followed by his personal biographer, the guy who kidnapped Data, the movie looks like it might actually get good for a minute. But, no. Gene Hackman kicks the shit out of English Bob and sends the most interesting character in the movie out of town for good.

The scene where Bob sits in Gene Hackman’s jail is perfectly illustrative of one of this movie’s biggest problems: its tendency to violate the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule. For all the awesome stories about the glory days the characters have to tell, you never get to see any of them. You just see a bunch of old guys walking around a room talking. Okay, that’s unfair…sometimes they’re outside in the rain. Compare this to Leone’s visual masterpieces, where dialogue is sparse and every shot seems delicately composed, and Unforgiven starts to look like My Dinner with Cowboys. The apex of this comes when Little Shit shows back up and, due to his eyesight problems, constantly asks if what just happened actually just happened.  Even Morgan Freeman’s death scene has to be relayed by one of the stupid whores, and it sounded awesome. Too bad we didn’t get to see it.

Did I mention that Morgan Freeman is in this movie?  You probably happen to know he is a popular and well-liked actor, in addition to being the voice of Visa. And if you’ve ever seen him, you may have noticed that he is, in fact, a black man. I only mention this, because despite being set in 1880, no one in the movie seems to notice.  For fuck’s sake, black people won’t be allowed to use the same water fountains as whitey for another EIGHTY YEARS, so when they catch a black man they assume to be an assassin, it’s reasonable to assume a few ‘n’ bombs might get dropped.

In the end, though, that’s a small complaint. The movie is just plain not good. Even with all the time the movie spends with the characters, I found myself hard pressed to care about what happened to any one of them. The movie’s moralizing is blatant and blunt (“Dear audience, killing is bad. Love, Unforgiven“), and the characterization dull.  Even Little Shit’s ‘twist’ — he’s never killed despite his claims otherwise — is obvious long before the big reveal. Adding to the unpleasantness that was Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood as a director is 0 for 3 in my book.

At least he used to kick ass in that green pancho.