Texas Rangers (2001)

I watched 5 minutes and found way too many historical inaccuracies. Not a single man is dressed like a Texas Ranger. The Captain of the Rangers threatens to track down a departing Ranger because he is stealing Ranger clothes, a Ranger badge, Ranger boots, a Ranger horse. To this day, the Rangers pay for their own clothes. In the old days, most Rangers refused to wear a badge because it was thought of as a target for the bad guys. Horses were not provided to any Ranger -- officer or enlisted. Many, if not most, Rangers did not wear the traditional cowboy hats. The Texas sun is too strong. Sombreros were very popular. Rangers were always on their horses. They did not wear their guns low like a gunslinger. That would be stupid. They wore them high so that they could get to them easier while mounted.You could make 30 or 40 good movies about the Rangers and their dealings with outlaws like Bass and Hardin. They could make a darn good comedy out of the One riot/One Ranger Dallas prizefight. They could make a great movie about Judge Roy and Langtry. Judge Roy Bean is the guy who eventually put on that prizefight, even though the Rangers did everything they could to stop it. They could have made a great movie about the Ranger who tracked down Bonnie and Clyde.They could have made a monumental movie. But instead they focus on crap. They present crap. They look like crap. They dress like crap. They speak like crap. No one in Texas, past or present, speaks like the goobers in this movie.In their entire history, the Rangers lost just one important battle. Besides that battle (Salinero Revolt), this movie is the blackest mark on Ranger history.

This movie is terrible. The only value that can possibly come from watching this awful film is the unintentional laughs you'll get from it several times during the otherwise entirely wasted hour and a half you'll spend watching this. Okay here is a good place to give you this advice, don't waste that hour and a half, watch something else or do something else, I kept watching thinking and hoping it would have to get better but it never did. The writing is pathetic but what really stands out is the incredibly pathetic acting, Ashton Kutcher stinks in everything I've seen him in but this performance is by far the worst I've ever seen from him, maybe it's because this is the only non-comedy role I've seen him in so him trying to do drama really stands out as just wrong. James Van Der Beek is very bad in this too but he still shines next to Ashton Kutcher. If you don't believe me and really do have an hour and a half to waste then watch it, you will get a couple chuckles out of watching Ashton Kutcher deliver lines in a pathetic attempt to "act".

In 1875, ten years after the end of the Civil War, Texas, especially the area along the Mexican border, is a wild, lawless place where ranchers and homesteaders are frequently threatened by bandits. The State Governor therefore decides to re-create the Texas Rangers, who had been disbanded after the Civil War, to uphold the law. The film follows the exploits of a company of Rangers led by Leander McNelly. The villain of the story is John King Fisher, the leader of a gang of outlaws who specialise in stealing cattle and then fleeing into Mexico, where the stolen cattle are sold to the Mexican army. The gang are ruthless killers, who have no compunction about murdering unarmed civilians in cold blood. It came as no surprise to discover that the film is loosely based on fact and that McNelly and King Fisher were real historical figures; "Leander McNelly" did not sound like the sort of name any scriptwriter would invent for a fictitious character. The film allegedly takes some liberties with the historical record, but these are unlikely to upset anyone other than experts on Texan history.Although the Texas Rangers are, strictly speaking, a law enforcement agency rather than a military unit, the film bears more resemblance to a war movie than to a cop film. The plot is that old staple of war movies, the one about the tough, experienced commander who takes a group of raw recruits (most of them are young men with little or no experience of guns or policing crime) and turns them into a crack fighting unit. In their initial battle with the bandits, the Rangers fall into a trap, and many of the young and ill-trained men are killed. Nevertheless they regroup, attract new recruits and face off against Fisher and his men in a final showdown.The film is directed by Steve Miner, previously known to me only as the man who made "Lake Placid", a dreadful horror-comedy unlikely to appeal to anyone other than those who feel that there is something inherently hilarious about someone getting their head bitten off by a gigantic crocodile. Fortunately, Miner makes no attempt to inject comedy elements into "Texas Rangers", and it is a better film than "Lake Placid", although that is not really saying much.The past few years have seen something of a revival of the Western genre. Many recent Westerns ("Dances with Wolves", "Unforgiven", "Wyatt Earp", "3.10 to Yuma") have been grand films made on an epic scale, but "Texas Rangers" is a much more modest, small-scale effort, more reminiscent of the old Western B-movies. Its total running time is very short for a twenty-first century film- the version I saw on British television recently only ran to eighty minutes. It is essentially a good-guys-versus-bad-guys Western of the old school with plenty of action and gunplay but without any deep significance. There are occasional attempts to inject a note of moral ambiguity- McNelly can be uncompromising in his methods- but there is little doubt that he and his men wear the metaphorical white hats and the Fisher gang the black ones. This is the sort of thing that Hollywood used to churn out by the dozen in the forties and fifties. 5/10

These people obviously love the old "spaghetti westerns". I was expecting Clint Eastwood to show up at any time. So true to the old genre that it's almost camp. Even the music is true to the genre that I expected to hear the theme from The Good, The Bad,and the Ugly at any moment... Some of the lighting and background is obviously theatrical, and the editing from scene to scene is clipped in places. I don't know why people are complaining so much when this was obviously more than a little tongue in cheek, with a tip of the hat to Italian westerns. Hey, who needs a plot when you've got the good guys against the bad guys? Viewed in that light, it was well-done. Otherwise, hardly an historical document ;-) If you want to know about Texas, read James Mitchner...