Red Sun (1971)

Directed by Terence Young. Starring Charles Bronson, Toshirô Mifune, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress, Capucine, Anthony Dawson, Lee Burton, Barta Barri, Tetsu Nakamura. [PG]

On paper, this probably looked like a sure thing: have Bronson play a gunslinging outlaw and Mifune play a samurai guard, recruit Delon to play a killer and throw in Andress as a quasi-love interest, hire a director who knows his way around tongue-in-cheek action (having previously helmed three James Bond pictures), then let them all loose in a standard payback/Macguffin-retrieval plot set in the Wild West. Alas, after a promising start, it never really gets going (more a series of loosely-connected vignettes of behavior and violence), and the payoffs are curiously muted, even the final showdown set in a burning cane field. International cast does what they can with comic book roles. Filmed in Spain, Spaghetti Western-style. Considering the number of surface similarities, this flick may have inspired the Jackie Chan/Owen Wilson vehicle, Shanghai Noon.

56/100