Bullet Points: Once Upon a Time in Deadwood

You’ve probably heard of Deadwood. It was a town in South Dakota that housed some of the most famous gunfighters, cowboys, and scoundrels the Wild West had ever seen. Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane all tipped a cup there in their day and you can be sure that the Western film genre will continue to pump out movie after movie featuring the dusty, old town. Now, it’s time for UnCork’d to take aim with their Colt Peacemaker and see if it hits the mark.

Synopsis: A notorious gunslinger is slipped a slow-acting poison by an heiress and told he has three days to track down and rescue her sister, who has been kidnapped by a gang of hoodlums and holds the antidote.

• “This abduction will not go unchallenged!”: I’ve spent a considerable amount of time watching movies about the Earp Brothers, Wild Bill Hickok, and other dudes doing crazy shit back then but I never remember anyone shouting out such a stupid line. The hot blonde gets taken by the hooligans mentioned in the synopsis but it’s the most genteel response from a hostage you could ever expect to see.
• The Magical Fruit: If my Pappy taught me anything it was to never trust a beautiful woman carrying a bowl of beans in the middle of nowhere. In what has to be the best case of “blinded by the booty” I can think of, The Colonel (Bronzi) unquestioningly accepts a “poisoned” bowl of beans from Ursula (Karin Brauns) that she just happened to have in her hand walking in the woods. Nasty!

• Gentlemen go one at a time: The Colonel does us a favor and has Ursula strip her shirt off and feign like she’s washing up in a frozen river. Dumb idea, yeah, but it also got us quick glimpse as to what Ursula was hiding under that white blouse. The men chasing them couldn’t help but be distracted by that bod. All his years of military training taught him how to get a woman to take her shirt off. Sounds about right….

• Men all want the same thing: Your absence.
• Showdown in Deadwood: The finale in the town with Ursula finally making her way to confront Michael Paré and save her sister. It is, by far, the best scene in the film. By the time that The Colonel shows up and starts blasting random fools, the movie actually feels like a movie about a legendary gunslinger who can get it done. I would have had an earlier scene with the bad guys hearing rumors of The Colonel being nearby so it would instill a little fear in them when they saw him arrive.
• A Villain Problem: Action movies need a really good villain to be great. Or, they can have a secondary bad guy who you just know is going to throw down with the hero at the end. This movie had neither. Paré isn’t on screen long enough to develop any type of relationship with the viewer and the one guy who faced off with Bronzi at the end hadn’t been on screen the entire movie. I would have shown him once or twice doing the bidding of Paré so we could really understand his station in life.

Bonus Bronzi calls for bonus Bullet points!

• Do you like watching people ride horses in slow motion? This is the movie for you!
• The poison gave The Colonel the EBG’s. Extreme bubble guts!
• Bronzi can really handle a horse! Looking forward to a movie where he’s a knight on a quest to save a maid in a town from a wizard!
• If this were my movie I would have had the Colonel fiddling with his watch a lot and then he could have used a sweet line line, “times up, dirtbag” at the end.

The Verdict: I love little subtleties in movies. Bronzi was a boss on that horse so I would have mentioned that he was a cavalryman in the movie. Give a little 20 second flashback of him with a handful of soldiers on horseback during the Indian Wars and then just sit back and watch the viewers nod with acceptance when he rides down those men at the end. Once Upon a Time in Deadwood is the kind of movie that I thought had loads of potential but missed on a few things. Namely, the villain and the lack of action. There was a fair amount of time getting The Colonel to go along with the program but really Ursula should have used his dead family as the motivator for why he should help her. The poison shtick didn’t work for me. I will forever love Paré for his past works (Streets of Fire!!!) but he just wasn’t around long enough for me to fear or care about him. Bronzi fans will like this one and it is far better than 2017’s From Hell to the Wild West. All in all, a solid effort and I can honestly say it makes me even more excited to see Escape from Death Block 13!