The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

A Movie Review

Disclaimer: all comments are based on first half of film. I didn't get into it.

One of the worst films I’ve ever tried to watch. I can’t believe all the praise it has received at IMDB. It has many problems, beginning with its violation of the first rule of story telling: show, don’t tell.

I’m sure that there are narrated stories that work, but too often they are a cheap crutch that removes the audience from the story while trying to help the audience understand the story. The length of this film didn’t bother me because I could eject it at any time, and I finally did. If I want to finish it, the movie is due back in a week and maybe I will watch more. But frankly, my dear, I don’t give a d***.

Brad Pitt is one of my favorite actors on the current scene. But this role was a mistake, at least as written here.

Whoever wrote this should be shot. Scene after scene is atrociously long and the dialogue all too often irrelevant. Let’s advance the story. What is point of the guy watching Robert Ford bathe and commenting on the size of his privates? No point at all… Maybe an attempt at humor in this midst of this drab, pitifully dull pretense at being an epic.

Recommended Reading: If you want to be a screenwriter buy Syd Field's Screenplay.

In this film the actors seem as lifeless as the story. That’s why I am mystified that so many reviewers at IMDB.com love it so much. There are too many positive reviews for me to believe it’s a disingenuous crowd of paid shills, so I guess a lot of folks saw something I didn’t.

Here’s a reviewer from IMDB whose sentiments I do share, however: “Yuk...... I hated this film.”

By way of contrast, other reviews at IMDB have praised the film’s “melancholic grandeur” and called it the “best film of the year.”

I prefer the review who titled his comments, “Yawn.”

The film is being praised as "interesting despite not being a shoot ‘em up Western." Yet there are whole slews of great films that are not shoot ‘em ups which have real drama and interesting characters. Try Cool Hand Luke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, or anything by Tennessee Williams. Even the flawed Hombre, based on a great Elmore Leonard book of the same name, was more compelling than this. There was a story there that even weak execution could not obliterate. This film, The Assassination of Jesse James, is a disgrace to what it could have been.

Funny thing is, I liked Brad Pitt in Troy which so many others panned. Maybe some of our experience gets colored by expectations. In this case, I expected more.