Given my love of the western genre, I had wanted to see this movie for years, but it apparently never got any kind of release in my country (Canada). But thanks to YouTube, I watched it today, and it didn't take me long to figure out why no Canadian distributor apparently wanted to touch it. Even if you are a lover of westerns, you'll greatly dislike this movie, even more so if you don't care for the genre. It goes wrong in just about any way you can think of. While you'll (sort of) understand what the title figure is trying to do, the journey to that point is incredibly muddled. Maybe the original script made more sense, but under Michael Parks' direction, things happen out of nowhere, and other things make no sense at all, and this constantly happens from the start to the end. The action sequences and even the scenes of dialogue seem to have been edited with a very limited amount of available footage, and have no zip as well as coherence. The movie plods on scene after scene with almost no energy. Also, the movie has a really cheap feeling, seemingly filmed on whatever abandoned buildings and countryside the production could get its hands on. And while the movie was made in the mid 1980s, it has a weird look and feel of a production from the mid 1970s. Don't expect this movie to get a release on DVD or Blu-Ray any time soon.
Review of The Return of Josey Wales
