Outlaws and Angels

Outlaws and Angels isn’t perfect — Murray mumbles into his beard way too much — but Eastwood sure is at ease with a cowboy hat and revolver. Clearly, she’s studied with the best.

Outlaws & Angels trades in the lurid character psychology and crude ironies of the spaghetti Western — an idiom whose cynical worst-case-scenario view of humanity seems more acceptable to modern audiences than the good-shall-triumph faith of the traditional Hollywood western.

Narrative risks aside, Outlaws and Angels takes the easy way out instead of allowing these moments the breathing room they need.

Despite worthy performances from the entire cast, this movie’s a prime example of a director admiring some great movies but only having a cursory, superficial understanding of what it was that made them work.

While Mollner elicits some strong performances — especially from Francesca Eastwood as a vengeful farmer’s daughter — Outlaws and Angels can’t overcome its distractingly showy camera moves or its tendency toward scenes that drag on interminably.

A movie hopped up on the period piece sadism within Tarantino’s regurgitation cinema, Outlaws & Angels gravely mistakes Tarantino’s audaciousness for its own originality.

No need to get worked up about Outlaws and Angels, a vile, nauseating and incomprehensible pile of saddles-and-spurs gibberish sane audiences will undoubtedly avoid at all costs.