The Showdown (2009)

This film has the worst script, worst acting I have ever seen. I could only take 10 minutes before shutting it off.What I find even worse than the movie itself is that the DVD cover boasts that it is in the tradition of High Noon and Dances with Wolves and soon to be a classic. Even though I only lasted 10 minutes a blind person could spot flaws in the set. The dance hall saloon was lit up as bright as the Las Vegas strip even though it is supposedly lit by oil lanterns. I have a collection of over 600 westerns and I can tell you this one is NOT part of it. Save your money and especially your time and avoid this movie.

This has to be one of the worst movies I ever hired. It's not about the money I spent on hiring it, I can always make more money ... but I will never get my time back!Lets get down to the nitty gritty. Costumes and sets, as well as make-up and some of the effects are quite good ... and that's about as far as it goes. The lighting is very bad, it does not enhance the moods in various scenes but instead works really hard at destroying it. The clothes are too clean, as are various furnishings. I've never seen a Western Saloon so squeaky clean you could almost eat off the floor!The acting is less than second rate, the actors (if you can call them actors) sound very wooden and almost like they're struggling to remember the script with such intensity that they forget all about actually acting. The lines of the script itself are very lame and often cliché, which in many instances could make the movie funny ... but it's not a comedy. Some of the extras in the background just stand there like wax dummies (in fact in one scene I actually thought they were wax dummies until they moved slightly). There are movies in which the actors will draw you into their story and make it believable, this isn't one of them, I didn't feel or care about any of the characters at all.The background music is also very cliché. If they had elevators with music back in those days, they would play some of the music from this movie.All in all The Showdown has a very home brewed quality about it, which is fine if it was made as a home movie for the family to watch or for the re-enactment society to screen on a slow Saturday afternoon. I just wish that such a waste of time hadn't been unleashed on the general movie-watching public. I cannot recommend this movie ... and I want my time back!

I sat down to watch this with my uncle and father, both of them just love westerns. However this is more like a 'folks in the woods' rather than a true 'western'. The acting was truly bad, it looked and felt like an amateur stage show, even the guns sounded like starter pistols.Some of the lines in the film are so bad that they are funny, if only the actors were not trying to be serious! After watching this we all heartily agreed that it was one of the worst films ever made.If you are a fan of westerns I recommend that you sit down to one of your Audie Murphy westerns from the 1950's and watch that instead.Don't waste your time with this one folks.

This is a really great western. Hard to believe it was shot entirely in Illinois. I am from Texas and it sure fooled me. This is a truly wonderful experience and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. We need more of these independent films that show that people can make a movie an act of love and dedication. You can see that the folks that made this movie really cared about doing the best job possible and without being paid or having some kind of contract. It was created in their spare time and definitely took many hours of their free time to make it. Again all I can say is job well done folks, this is truly a labor of love. Hope to see more of these great endeavors.