Stone flies as star in farcical western

By TODD RITTER
Collegian Arts Writer

Westerns are usually clich-ridden melodramas that recycle the same plots over and over again. Most of them are overrated and those so-called western classics (Shane, High Noon, Unforgiven) just don't hold up after repeated viewings.

The Quick and the Dead, a new film starring Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman and directed by cult favorite Sam Raimi, breaks the western stereotypes.

The Quick and the Dead focuses on a woman with no name who rides into a town called Redemption and finds herself entered in a quick-draw contest, looking for some redemption of her own.

Besides Stone, other participants include the mayor (Hackman in a sly send-up of his Unforgiven role), Leonardo DiCaprio, as the mayor's cocky son, and a reluctant killer-turned-preacher.

It is a standard western plot that has been seen a hundred times but Raimi, who directed such bizarre films as The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness, has the good sense to use this to his advantage. He takes every western stereotype imaginable, inflates it to about three times its normal size and rolls it into Redemption's only street. The results are surprisingly amusing.

This is not a serious western. There is a clock tower, in homage to High Noon, that looms over the town. The town itself, purposely resembling the shoddy set work of B westerns from the 1950s, looks so flimsy that one expects it to blow away with the tumbleweed. The music sounds like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on a bad day. There are also witty references to dozens of other westerns -- new and old.

Raimi, always inventive, spruces up the proceedings with rapid-fire editing and some of the more imaginative camera angles in recent memory.

Stone is believable as a woman bent on revenge. (She shuns the glamour that hurt last year's female western, Bad Girls.) She's not a great actress, but it's nice to see her moving away from the sexpot roles that made her a star.

Hackman can play this type of character in his sleep but he adds a few perverse touches to make it interesting. Both he and Stone know that Raimi is the star of the show.

The Quick and the Dead is a fast-moving flick that will most likely annoy western purists. It adds a healthy dose of humor that is desperately needed in a genre that takes itself much too seriously.