Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
With such a long title, either the movie is a spoof or it’s so serious that the title couldn’t have been named something else at all. Unluckily, none of the two is the case, and it’s just a plain boring nothing saying piece of western bullocks.
Let’s not talk about pacing. Even removing 23 frames per second and speeding up the remaining by a factor 10, it’s still slow. Let’s not even talk about the script. If it was delivered to me, I’d order a hitman to kill the writer (/director in this case, Andrew Dominik), and I’d burn the script along with the bike messenger who brought it to me, just for good measure.
This movie is based on a script with dull meaningless dialogue, uneventful encounters and tries to gain some kind of respect for an ordinary bandit (and fails). Some might adore the visuals delivered (not me), but besides an admirable twitchy Casey Affleck (playing Robert Ford), this is just an endurance test. It’s more difficult than running the 42.195 kilometres marathon, but I made it, just to write this review and warn you.2.