I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be franchises that will work better backwards (Die Hard, I'm looking at you) but somewhere the sequels may even outstrip the original or even find that the whole franchise itself hasn't aged well.
So then to our first sequel and a movie that I've already done a mini-review before for WhatCulture in:
YOUNG GUNS II (1990 dir. Geoff Murphy)
Why I bought it/Why I liked it:
Ok so to quickly get what might be considered a hipster view, I liked westerns before they were cool. Way before Westworld or Red Dead Redemption II or Ol' Town Road, I used to sit down and watch mid 90's westerns like The Quick & The Dead and reruns of Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy with my dad on a weekly basis. I grew up with them, I studied them, I love them.
When growing up and being allowed to buy movies that I wanted to, I needed to do a bunch of catching up and Young Guns fit the bill. I watched, I liked, I heard the sequel was better but it actually became rarer than hen's teeth to find the damn DVD.
Finally, it wandered into CEX and I immediately snapped it up and gave it a watch and did indeed agree that it seems to improve on the original in all manners. It kept all the good ones from the first film and added guys like Christian Slater and Alan Ruck and William freaking Petersen just to bolster the star power and it had a nicer flow to it.
Oh, and it has a kick-ass Jon Bon Jovi soundtrack, Blaze of Glory still a perennial iPod favourite.
If I think it'll stay in the collection:
I think it will. More so than Young Guns honestly. Everyone from the first one has matured as actors and as I mentioned there's an addition of new talent which really helps the film. I'm sure I'll be singing along to the Jovi soundtrack in no time and uttering Kiefer's legendary "William H Bonney, You are NOT a God" line in time also.
I might be wrong though, without Young Guns first to make this film seem better, perhaps as a stand-alone it hasn't aged as well. Well, the proof is in the pudding so let's get to this:
The review:
From the opening notes of some classical Spanish guitar, I sort of knew that I was in for a good watch.
Young Guns II mostly operates on the classic, do something every 15 minutes principle meaning that every 15 minutes, you're guaranteed an action sequence either in a chase or a shoot-out. As such the movie rarely gets dull.
There were far more people in this than I remembered including one of my favourite old school actors, James Coburn. See it's clever because he played Pat Garrett in Peckinpah's telling of the story and is synonymous with a number of Westerns. It's smart casting people!
Oh and some Viggo Mortensen guy pops up as one of Garrett's men too, I'm sure he never amounted to anything.
It's interesting how many films sort of glorify the legend of Billy The Kid as in reality the guy was a real piece of work but Emilio certainly plays him with enough charm and as predicted earlier, the film flows at a quick pace ensuring that its 100-minute run-time passed by quickly enough.
There are sequences that sort of make you cringe during, the introduction of a child character is simply set up to give the movie pathos, my cynical self snorting at the eventual passing of said character and some of the deaths seem a tad over-dramatic.
That being said, it passes the muster as a fun action-packed western.
Should it stay or should it go?
For a blog called 'Too Many DVDs' and for the intention to help thin out my collection, with 4 movies under my belt, I'm not doing too well on the thinning out front. Young Guns II is an enjoyable enough flick to survive this round of culling and it gets a nice 7 out of 10 from me.
I leave you with JBJ himself, the earth was last night's bed for him apparently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfmYCM4CS8o
No prizes for guessing what the next film is...
Until next time, I remain,
Matt Major.
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