Young Guns II (1990)

Directed by Geoff Murphy. Starring Emilio Estevez, William Petersen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Kiefer Sutherland, Christian Slater, James Coburn, Alan Ruck, Jenny Wright, R.D. Call, Balthazar Getty, Scott Wilson, Viggo Mortensen. [PG-13]

Sequel to the surprise hit Western plays even faster and looser with historical record than the first one, reassembling the survivors and adding a few new youthful loose cannons. Here, Pat Garrett (Petersen) is paid to track down and kill Billy the Kid (Estevez), a story told better and more interestingly in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (and without a labored framing device set in the middle of the 20th century that uses the Brushy Bill Roberts fraud to suggest that the Kid is still alive). Direction, photography and musical score are all better this time out, but the screenplay wanders aimlessly, and builds to an anti-climax; by necessity of the “fabricated truth,” the true villains (Wilson’s Governor Lew Wallace and Coburn’s John Chisum) vanish halfway through, leading to a series of incomplete incidents among the scattered remnants of Billy’s cohorts while Garrett halfheartedly continues his pursuit. Scene-stealing work from Wright’s bare backside. Rocker Jon Bon Jovi can be spotted in an obscured cameo as a prisoner; he also contributed a song to the soundtrack called “Blaze of Glory.”

45/100