AMERICAN OUTLAWS

“Bad is good again” goes the tag line for Les May eld’s updating of the Jesse James legend. What does that mean? That the Confederacy, in particular Quantrill’s Raiders, the ruthless gang of brigands in which Jesse and company spent the Civil War killing, raping, and pillaging (massacring 150 civilians in Lawrence, Kansas alone), were in fact the good guys? (They practically won the damn war, if the film’s opening credit sequence is to be believed.) That Jesse himself was actually a cross between Robin Hood and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix? That Colin Farrell, who put in such a promising performance last year in Tigerland, has since seen the error of his ways and now sucks? That corny dialogue, absurd implausibility, grotesque historical distortion (who knew there were no black people in Missouri in the 1860s — maybe Quantrill’s Raiders lynched them all?), tedious characters, and hammy acting (e.g., Timothy Dalton, as detective nemesis Allan Pinkerton, doing a bad Sean Connery imitation) are virtues if the audience laughs out loud? If it meant that the subversiveness of films like The Wild Bunch is back in style again, that certainly would be good. But what it probably means that this summer’s movies have been so bad, people no longer know the difference. If they believe this stinker is good, that’s bad indeed.

— Peter Keough