A laborious epic Western in an otherwise handsomely mounted production.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 23, 2024

Director Lawrence Kasdan's three-hour plus journey to the notorious shoot-out at the OK Corral is a monumental western that works both as a serious history lesson and as a quietly understated drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2024

In each of his fine, flavorful scenes, Quaid handily supplies the energy and humor sorely lacking from the rest of this tedious, windy film.

| May 8, 2023

The movie’s potential as a complex epic Western leaks out somewhere in the second hour.

| Original Score: C | Aug 31, 2022

Wyatt Earp tries to confront us with something weightier than the pleasures of old-fashioned heroism. Unfortunately, it ends up offering something sketchier: a psychodramatic hero without a center.

| Original Score: C | Dec 22, 2021

Wyatt Earp presents unvarnished historical realism as a kind of ultimate Truth, and it might actually work if Kasdan didn't keep piling on the Western-movie clichés.

| Dec 22, 2021

Quaid, who lost 43 pounds for the role, looks like the original cowboy junkie, a hollow-cheeked spectre. And every moment he is onscreen, he injects such delightful venom into his scenes that the flatness of the film around him becomes all too obvious.

| Dec 22, 2021

Gorgeously shot and meticulously designed, Wyatt Earp is big, solemn -- and barely alive.

| Dec 22, 2021

Wyatt Earp has few "things" happening; it's merely a series of events. And in the end, the hero's descent into mindless killing makes him both unsympathetic and unreadable.

| Dec 22, 2021

Unfortunately, the film's epic framework and glacial star prevent even this lightly revisionist treatment from having much impact.

| Dec 22, 2021

Costner still exhibits that old spark in places but somehow, he never breathes much life into his traditional interpretation. And this western is so traditional, it's practically corseted.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 22, 2021

Kasdan's direction seems hopelessly lost with this material. The film is shot in Cinemascope, with one western cliche after another, but no sense of irony.

| Dec 22, 2021

Kasdan's is not the definitive, the perfect or (one presumes) the last film about Wyatt and his brothers, but it does paint place and time with an agreeable mixture of nostalgia and what passes for realism.

| Dec 22, 2021

Like Silverado, Kasdan's other western, Wyatt Earp ambles around in circles, giving you plenty of time to forget how one anticlimax is linked to the next.

| Dec 22, 2021

Above all, the movie creates a plausible portrait of Wyatt and, through Costner's presence, at once ordinary and charismatic, it leaves a question mark over him.

| Dec 22, 2021

Leone, Eastwood, and Peckinpah have shown us how flexible the western form can be. But if it cannot evolve further than this, it may be time finally to admit that the genre has had it.

| Dec 22, 2021

The result is never less than decent but very seldom inspirational. Somehow there seems to be a better film trying hard to get out -- one which treats the legend with suspicion and questions its validity a good deal harder.

| Dec 22, 2021

There are very great things in Wyatt Earp. If you love American movies -- especially westerns -- you owe it to yourself to see it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 22, 2021

What you shouldn't do is turn [Wyatt Earp's] story into a solemn biopic, grinding relentlessly, without selectivity or point of view, through a rootless and episodic life from adolescence to old age.

| Dec 22, 2021

The best part of Wyatt Earp is Quaid's death-rattle drawl as the tubercular gunslinger. The rest of the movie just creaks.

| Original Score: C | Dec 22, 2021