American Outlaws Details

The boy-band syndrome — pretty-boy, non-threatening blandness without a shirt — has now infected the machismo of the western. Billed as the new millennium's first cowboy film (is it really so long since the Young Guns movies?), this features young gunslingers who would seem more at home popping pimples than pumping pistols — even when they're up against land-grabbing railroad barons and their minions. It's yet another re-telling of the Jesse James story, with Colin Farrell as Jesse and Scott Caan as his partner Cole Younger. Director Les Mayfield may portray them as mere run-of-the-mill Robin Hoods, but this is all about attracting the Dawson's Creek crowd to the movie. There's a welcome appearance by Oscar-winning actress Kathy Bates as Jesse's mother, while Timothy Dalton — an ex-James Bond down on his luck? — plays detective Allan Pinkerton, hired by the evil railroad bosses to hunt the boys down. The trouble with this gang, though, is that the schoolmarm in a John Wayne or Henry Fonda western could have easily “whupped” them.

This is no more than another failed attempt, in the manner of the dire Young Guns movies, to find a young audience for Westerns by portraying its characters as rock star protoypes.