Well, I loved 3:10 to Yuma and hated The Proposition. I guess that makes me a cheeseball Hollywood-loving ****e. Oh well. I guess I'll have to live with that.
Why did I hate the Proposition? I shouldn't have. I certainly didn't want to. I remember seeing the trailer and thought the concept was brilliant for a Western. And a Western set in Australia (which technically makes NOT a Western, of course) is always a cool concept (loved Quigley Down Under). And with top talents like Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, David Wenham and Emily Watson, I seemed like it couldn't go wrong.
And yet, somehow, it did. At least for me. Westerns seem to have a problem in modern cinema. Anytime they are ENTERTAINING, people automatically write them off as flashy, stylistic garbage. However, when they are a long, drawn-out method of torture that could bore an accountant to tears, critics praise them like they're the greatest pile of cow manure to hit the big screen in a decade. And if you don't like it, well... you just must not be sophisticated enough to "get" it.
Or maybe you can just recognize a bad movie when you see one. While I wouldn't necessarily call The Proposition "bad," I can't like it because all I saw was wasted potential. A great concept for a story but not a clue how to tell it. A morally conflicted lawman holds the "good" brother hostage so that the "kind-of good, kind-of bad" brother will go kill the "evil-as-satan" brother. Interesting concept? Check. Good actors to pull off the roles? Check. But the moment John Hurt shows up and begins overacting to the point where I thought he was going to turn to the cameraman and tell him to use the scene for his oscar clip, I could tell something was wrong. It's that same feeling I get whenever I see a horror movie that looks like it's going to be something mind-blowing in the previews but in the back of my mind, I know that it probably has some hack script that won't even come close to pulling off what it intends to. This was the problem with The Proposition. I went into it hoping to see a great Western, but all I got was a depressing bore, chock full of characters that I couldn't give two sh**ts about. David Wenham probably gives the best performance in the film because I think he at least was the only character who was SUPPOSED to be completely unlikeable, and he was. I think you're supposed to feel some sort of sympathy or empathy for the rest of the characters, but I personally couldn't wait for them to do the world a favor and just shoot each other. Even Ray Winstone's performance, while good, didn't impress me all that much.
In the end, if you loved The Proposition, hey, good for you. Glad you could find something in there that I didn't. But I guess I'm just irritated that we only get one traditional Western every three or four years anymore because it's considered a "dead" genre now, and when we do, the film gets accused of pandering to typical Hollywood ideals. If anything, it's actually going AGAINST the grain because it's attempting to revive a genre that film audiences have ditched for superhero films and sci-fi fantasy epics.
When someone puts forth their passion for a movie such as you did, it always makes me want to take another look which i will do as i have the proposition.
