Saturday, April 12, 2008

Lone Rider

Tonight we watched the latest made-for-TV Western on the Ion Network, LONE RIDER. Lou Diamond Phillips plays a former cavalryman who returns to his hometown to find that his childhood friend has married his old sweetheart and turned into the town tyrant, bent on controlling everything no matter who gets in his way. You know that sooner or later, there’s gonna be a showdown . . .

And so there is, although the movie pretty much takes forever to get there. Like ACES ‘N’ EIGHTS, the first entry in Ion’s Saturday Night Westerns series, there’s nothing in the script for this one that you couldn’t find in dozens, if not hundreds, of paperback Westerns published fifty years ago. There’s nothing really wrong with LONE RIDER. It’s well-acted, and the production values are okay. It’s just so relentlessly unoriginal. The DVD comes out next week, but I don’t really recommend it.

3 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

That's disappointing. I really like Lou Diamond PHillips and wish he'd find a decent vehicle to show his chops. He's been doing a lot of low grade movies for the past few years.

AndyDecker said...

I wonder that this title isn´t trademarked. Or is this "The Lone Rider"?

James Reasoner said...

This new movie is just LONE RIDER. The Lone Rider was the character played by George Houston in a series of B-Westerns, but they were low-budget productions and I doubt if the title was ever trademarked. But I'm far from an expert on this stuff, so I could easily be wrong.

Phillips was in this area appearing in a play a year or so ago, and I seem to remember a newspaper interview in which he said that as an actor, he'd rather be working than not, so he took the scripts that came along. Sort of the same way I approach writing, I guess.