IMDb #111 Review: Unforgiven (1992)

Source: Wikipedia

The Wild West wasn't so wild to live in. It wasn't so much rugged loners taming a harsh land, as it was harsh land punishing the angry violent shitheads who couldn't survive anyplace else. And thus Clint Eastwood, old and charmingly crotchety, sets out to demolish the very myths he embodied in his youth.

For reasons unexplained by the introductory text scroll, a young lady marries a thief. He becomes a shitty farmer, until smallpox reduces his wife to a a mound of inanimate chemicals. Alone, he can't manage his hogs, let alone his motherless children.

Elsewhere in Wyoming, bad guys (who claim they aren't bad guys) rape and mutilate a prostitute. Without their pimp knowing, the ladies-of-the-night save up to put up a $1000 bounty on the bastards. This provokes the ire of the townsmen, who want to avoid the sort of ruffians attracted to the bounty on the other ruffians.

The prior category of ruffians include a crack-shot Englishman. He travels with his nebbish biographer and preaches monarchy to provincial dunderheads. Then the little town's petty sheriff (and shitty carpenter) kicks the shit out of the old man and provides the bland truth behind the embellished biography. This same sheriff strictly enforces the town's no-gun policy -- using guns, of course.

In the only predictable part of this anti-western, the farmer abandons retirement to hunt the bounty. He rides out with a young man who over-inflates his personal legend (whereas the old man downplays his).

It's an ugly, grungy story, grounded in reality and fertilized with pain. Guns make smoke; weapons fire and misfire. Men and women die slow and agonizing deaths, pathetically, sometimes in the outhouse. Riding out in the rain results in potentially fatal fevers. Self-styled heroes fight dirty, whereas braggarts run screaming at the first sign of danger. And killing messes people up for life -- "It takes all a man is, all he'll ever be." For both victim and perpetrator.

131 minutes.