American Outlaws

American Outlaws

For decades, people have been saying that the Western is dead. This movie proves that not only is the B Western dead, it aspires to be a bad movie and fails even at that. Imagine the cast of “American Pie” given horses, costumes, lots of money and a camera, and told to act serious and pretend they’re cowboys, and this is what you’d get.

It’s about the gang formed by Jesse James and Cole Younger after the Civil War a gang which in this movie curiously embodies the politics of the anti-globalization demonstrators at Seattle, Sweden and Genoa. A railroad is a comin’ through town, see? And they don’t want it. When the railroad hires Pinkertons to blow up farms, and Jesse and Frank’s mother gets blowed up real good, then they vow revenge: They’ll steal the payroll from banks.

So we’ve got some questions here. Why are they against the railroad? In much better movies like “The Claim,” everybody sees the coming of the railroad as an economic windfall; fortunes were made by where it decided to lay its tracks. For farmers it was a lifeblood fast and cheap transportation for livestock and crops to market.

But on those barren James farms where nothing much is done oh well. There aren’t any visible herds or crops or anything; just some chickens scratching in the dirt while Ma James (Kathy Bates) apparently works them alone during all those years when her boys are off to war. In fact I think her hardest labor ever in this whole film might be dying in one scene.

Jesse James is played by Colin Farrell, who turned on instant star quality in “Tigerland” (2000), made during his lunch hour from acting school (I exaggerate slightly), but turns it off here with disastrous results. That this picture got a release when “Tigerland” didn’t is an example of how American distribution is like a crap shoot.

Scott Caan plays Jesse’s partner Cole Younger, Gabriel Macht is Frank James, and Jim and Bob Younger are Gregory Smith and Will McCormack. Farrell looks less like the leader of a gang than the lead singer of a boy band, and indeed he and the boys spend time arguing about their billing: Should it be the James Gang? The James-Younger Gang? The Younger James Gang? (Naw, that sounds like there’s an Older James Gang.) There was a great American film about the James-Younger gang, Philip Kaufman’s “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid” (1972), which this movie crouches in the shadow of.

According to “American Outlaws,” Jesse James was not motivated by money but by righteous anger (and publicity all the boys loved being famous). After getting his revenge and knocking over countless banks, what he basically wants to do is retire from the gang and get himself a farm and settle down with pretty Zee Mimms (Ali Larter). His delusion that America’s most famous bank robber who committed “the first daylight bank robbery in American history” could peacefully return to farming represents an understanding of reality that might charitably be described as limited.

While reflecting on the number of night robberies in American history, it introduces us to the criminals. The railroad belongs to Thaddeus Rains (Harris Yulin), who talks about “the sanctity of progress,” and his henchmen are led by Allan Pinkerton (Timothy Dalton), who spends most of the movie looking like he knows a lot more than he’s saying, some of it about Jesse James, the rest about this screenplay.

There is something accurate here; the James house was bombed by the Pinkertons, but Ma didn’t die she only lost an arm. But little true in this movie, where the James-Younger Gang comes off less as desperadoes than ornery cut-ups. The shoot-outs follow the eternal movie rule that the villains can’t aim and the heroes can’t miss. Dozens of extras get killed, countless stunt men pitch forward off buildings, but with stars there’s great economy: Their deaths are doled out parsimoniously according to formula screenplay requirements.

If you should be so unlucky as to see “American Outlaws,” rent Kaufman’s “The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid” and meditate that giants once strode Hollywood. The style, class and brains of a Western like that (in an era that also gave us “The Wild Bunch”) is almost a rebuke to “American Outlaws.” What happened to the hardheaded American intelligence that made Ford and Hawks and Peckinpah? When did cowboys become teen pop idols?

Watch American Outlaws For Free On Gomovies.