Shoot Out Reviews

Sometimes being a big fan of a star means having to suffer through their lesser vehicles. It’s not that Gregory Peck can’t play a bad boy, he did well and had a lot of fun in Duel in the Sun, or that Henry Hathaway can’t make an entertaining movie, 14 Hours and Niagara prove that he can. No, the problem is quite simply this: Shoot Out reunites the main players of True Grit, director Hathaway, writer Marguerite Roberts, producer Hal B. Wallis, but no star John Wayne, and they expected the same results to pop out by placing someone else in the Wayne role. Moreover, as great an actor Peck was, he was no John Wayne. Peck was too tenderhearted and morally sound as time went on, whereas Wayne could be morally compromised and tough as leather.

The other major obstacle is that Shoot Out isn’t given a terribly engaging script. It plays out like a lesser quasi-remake of True Grit throughout. A curmudgeon gunslinger gets stuck with a younger female sidekick in a quest for revenge. One gets the sense that they have seen this movie before, and much better elsewhere. So, the story is boring, failing to hold our interest as it checks off each box on its way towards the inevitable conclusion. It’s a journeyman effort through and through, just barely watchable due to a high level of production and technique on display, but not for much else.