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

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

| 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

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

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

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

Wyatt Earp has a lot going for it, including what is possibly the best performance of his movie career by Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday... But it's more than three hours long and god-awful heavy-handed, so it tends to wear you down.

| Dec 22, 2021

While Kurt Russell brought out the hustler and the self-interested businessman in Earp in Tombstone, Kasdan's more grandiose and far superior Wyatt Earp is undeniably as close as Hollywood has yet come to getting it right.

| Dec 22, 2021

Here there is action or there is plot, but the two are never simultaneous as in most great Westerns. In between the buffalo stampedes and scenic panoramas, Wyaft Earp trades in contradictions instead of character.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 22, 2021

If Wyatt Earp isn't quite Heaven's Other Gate, it's as close as anyone's likely to get to repeating that classic horse-opera folly.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 22, 2021

With a half-formed hero at its center, the movie never comes together. Uncertainly paced, it meanders for most of its length, spelling out its themes instead of absorbing them into strong characters and expressive imagery.

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

In their attempt to create a full psychological portrait of the legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp, writer-director-producer Lawrence Kasdan and star-producer Kevin Costner have managed something I would have thought impossible. They've made him boring.

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

This physically imposing, but pretentiously ponderous Western, has less to do with the heroic than the passing gas of bloat.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 22, 2021

Not exactly a failure, Wyatt Earp is more accurately described as simply not the picture it wants so hard to be.

| Dec 22, 2021

Wyatt Earp is essentially a biopic, but it's a biopic in search of a subject. For all its attention to period detail and the many stages in a picturesque life, the film can't decide whether to honor the man, the myth or both.

| Dec 22, 2021

The running time of three hours and change is frankly unjustified by a film that values scenery and historical minutiae over suspense and supporting characterizations.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 21, 2021