No Earp story would be complete without one of U.S. I wonder if creative choices were made to make Boothe’s Curly Bill sweeter, to shine the real villain spotlight on Ringo. His addled brain had no idea what he’d done, and he seemed legit concerned. You have a sleazy Sheriff Behan, a doomed Marshall White, and that scallywag Curly Bill running amok in the streets all doped up on opium.Įven after Curly Bill guns a good man down, I can’t be mad at him. Titanic wasn’t going to end with everyone intact, and neither is Tombstone. This Tombstone is all clean streets, cheerful saloon girls, and minimal shooting.īut we all know the film is building to the gunfight at the OK Corral (the event, not the Kirk Douglas movie). The town of Tombstone itself is introduced as a bustling metropolis, as far as old West towns go (especially if you’ve seen Deadwood, which you should, because MOAR POWERS BOOTHE). No other actor has come close to matching Kilmer’s version of Doc. The more times I watch Tombstone, and the more personal research I do, I seriously appreciate how much Kilmer channeled of the real John Henry Holliday: the highly educated, musically gifted, language-loving mama’s boy who spent his entire adult life dying. It’s not just that Kilmer was given a great script – he made Tombstone’s simplified alcoholic, TB-addled Doc Holliday into something so completely mesmerizing, you can’t look away. He was meme-worthy and GIF-worthy before those things were invented. Here you have Wyatt’s physical opposite: frail, pasty, beaded with sweat, coughing up a lung, yet somehow also oozing refined Southern charm.Įvery line out of his mouth is a LINE. But apparently he was always REALLY good to his horses.Ĭut to the whole point of this movie: Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer). The real Wyatt Earp did quite a few less-than-noble things (horse thievery, jailbreak, adultery, yadda yadda yadda). This positions him as a noble, caring dude. Next we meet Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), defending a horse from a beating. I recognized Biehn while watching Tarantino’s Planet Terror just by those eyes.
On the other end of the gunslinger spectrum there’s Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn). I get that he’s basically a dickhead, but Boothe gives him this jovial bad boy charm, like you want to have drinks with him. I liked Curly Bill (Powers Boothe) from from his first moments on film.
There’s no doubt that they’re the bad guys, but you can see different levels of bad within their group. This concludes with Johnny Ringo gunning down a preacher. The Cochise Cowboys (a real-life gang of troublemakers) gallop into a small Mexican community and wreak havoc at a wedding, murdering the groom.
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