Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995) is a western with a definite spaghetti western vibe.

A Mysterious Stranger rides into town. A gunslinger who doesn’t say very much and mostly gives the impression of being tortured and dangerous. But the twist is, the gunslinger is a girl! Since she doesn’t talk much you could call her The Woman With No Name (although eventually we discover that her name is Ellen). The fact that the gunslinger is female and is played by Sharon Stone who was, in the wake of Basic Instinct, briefly a very big star was the movie’s main selling point. In fact, its only real selling point. The producers figured that was enough but they were wrong and the movie performed poorly at the box office.

There are lots of gunslingers in town (the town is called Redemption). They’re there for a gunfighting competition organised by John Herod (Gene Hackman), a slimy individual who runs the town. The competition will be a series of gunfights with the last man left alive walking off with a huge cash prize.

The Woman With No Name has, naturally, a secret. She has come to Redemption for revenge. She wants revenge for something that happened many years earlier. At the time she was just a little girl so of course the man she wants to kill doesn’t recognise her. She enters the competition.

The only other notable contestants are the Kid, played by Leonardo DiCaprio (who looks about twelve years old although he was twenty at the time), and Cort (Russell Crowe).

Cort doesn’t want to be there. He was once a killer and an outlaw but he got religion and became a preacher. He doesn’t believe in killing any more. Herod intends to force him to fight. It’s not clear if Herod wants Cort dead or just humiliated.

There are about sixteen gunslingers in the competition but we know that the only ones likely to survive long enough to make it to the movie’s inevitable final showdown are the ones played by top-billed cast members. Which means Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman and Russell Crowe. The others, played by supporting actors, are just there to get gunned down one by one which means that most of the movie’s interminable series of gunfights generate no suspense whatsoever. Crucially, we have no reason to care what happens to these guys. We just want them to get killed off as quickly as possible so we can get to the important climactic gunfights.

That’s the movie’s single biggest problem. It’s too long and there are too many gunfights and it gets repetitive. It lessens the impact of the gunfights that really matter, the ones involving the movie’s stars.

Cort is of course forced to fight. Ellen isn’t interested in winning the competition but she will have to fight as well. Eventually only four gunslingers are left alive and none of them have any interest in winning the money. They have other motivations.

I’ve never been the biggest Gene Hackman fan but he’s OK here. Herod is of course just a stereotypical western sinister bad guy. He’s a bit too much of an evil comic-book super-villain which means the final confrontations become simplistic good vs evil battles.

I don’t think I’ve seen more than one or two of Leonardo DiCaprio’s movies so I have no feelings one way or the other about him as an actor. He’s adequate here in a not very interesting rôle.

I’ve only seen a handful of Russell Crowe’s movies but I thought he was superb in Master and Commander. The Quick and the Dead was his first Hollywood movie. He has the most interesting part and gets to do some real acting and he’s very impressive.

Sharon Stone (whom I loved in Basic Instinct and Total Recall) spends a lot of time brooding. The Quick and the Dead really did nothing for her career. On the plus side there is some attempt to give her character some complexity. Unlike the other gunfighters she is not a natural killer. She is repelled by killing but her desire for revenge compels her to kill. She doesn’t like what it is doing to her. This inner conflict is the movie’s biggest strength and it’s handled reasonably well.

Another problem is that the central premise is just a little bit silly and far-fetched. OK, there’s a big cash prize but realistically why would any gunfighter enter a competition in which his chances of being killed are ridiculously high?

The look of the film is an uneasy mix of grunginess and cartoonish exaggeration.

Lady gunfighter movies were nothing new. Raquel Welch had made such a movie, Hannie Caulder, way back in 1972. Hannie Caulder is also a revenge western and it also dealt with the consequences for a woman of becoming a killer. Hannie Caulder is a much more successful and thought-provoking movie than The Quick and the Dead and in my view Raquel Welch’s performance is slightly more impressive than Sharon Stone’s. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Stone’s performance but Welch was absolutely superb in Hannie Caulder.

It’s interesting that in the same year this big-budget major-studio Girls With Guns western was made another Girls With Guns western appeared, Jim Wynorski’s ultra low budget Hard Bounty. Hard Bounty has its problems as well but it’s more interesting and more fun than The Quick and the Dead.

This movie is by no means a total loss. The climactic showdowns, when we finally get to them, are tense and well-staged with a few surprises. The Quick and the Dead is worth a look but don’t set your expectations too high.