Normally, I don't like Westerns. My favorites have been fish-out-of-water frontier flicks, such as Billy Crystal's Mets-capped City Slickers and Mel Brooks' parody to end all parodies, Blazing Saddles.

So why did I like Tombstone, a tried-and-true, shoot-'em-up Western? Two words: Val Kilmer.

Kilmer plays John "Doc" Holliday, an elegant gambler dying of tuberculosis, but who is too dignified to care. As Holliday, Kilmer displays more character in a simple gesture than most of the supporting cast manages in the whole film.

First seen robbing a casino of all its cash, Holliday oozes charm as he declares, "I calculate that's the end of this town." His matter-of-fact way of moving, speaking and killing makes Holliday shine.

Kilmer also gets all the great lines. When a villain tells him he (Holliday) is too drunk to shoot him, Holliday, who is seeing double, pulls another gun and says, "I have two guns, one for each of you."

But Kilmer is not the billed star. That honor goes to Kurt Russell, who plays Wyatt Earp, a retired Western lawman. Earp has come to Tombstone, a small saloon town, in hopes of striking it rich.

Anyway, there's trouble in town. The reigning law-and-order vigilantes, the Cowboys, are getting out of hand. Easily spotted by their red sashes (mainly so the audience can tell who's who in this cast o'thousands flick), the Cowboys run rampant over the law, and somebody must stop them.

Although Russell does an admirable job as that somebody, he fails to bring enough interest to a character who is supposed to be the lead. Kilmer, instead, plays that fish-out-of-water character that attracts me to Westerns. He is suave, controlled, slyly hysterical and doesn't conform to preconceived Western-hero notions.

Russell, on the other hand, is a standard Western hero, bringing nothing new to the genre. Every scene with Kilmer is a treat that unfortunately calls attention to Russell's stock personality.

The villains in Tombstone are mean enough, but poorly written. The head Cowboy, Curly Bill (Powers Boothe), alternates from whimsical nuisance to evil killer without explanation. The second-in-command, Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), is a pointless character who seems to have been written only as a foil to Holliday.

Thrown in for good measure is Earp's love interest, played by Dana Delany. She plays her part well, but her abilities are as wasted as the rest of the supporting cast's. Sam Elliott and Robert Burke play Earp's underwritten brothers, and I have no idea what Jason Priestley is doing in this movie.

Even Charlton Heston shows up for about five minutes as a kindly rancher. But after seeing him parodied on "Saturday Night Live" (Soylent Green is people! It's people!), I couldn't really take him seriously.

I'm not giving away too much when I say almost everyone dies -- it's almost inevitable from the start in this movie chock-full of sacrifice and angst. The only death that had any effect on me was Holliday's. Dignified to the end, when Earp asks how he is, Holliday responds, "I'm dyin', how are you?"

Overall, Tombstone is a decent Western that would be watchable without Kilmer, but he changed the movie from an OK in my book to a cool. From a guy who doesn't really like Westerns, that's pretty high praise indeed.