British director Alex Cox gives us just enough glimpses of the hero amidst a blood-spurting Peckinpah-esque shootout in Mexico, or urging his horse across a cactus-studded Southwest landscape, to establish him in a mythic Western milieu and to make it clear that it's exactly that strain in the national character that leads to fascism, imperialism, jingoism, and other nefarious "isms" cleverly concealed in Americanism. This actual historical character from the middle of the last century is commissioned by "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt to "stabilize" the situation in "a fucked-up little country somewhere south of here," by the name of Nicaragua. Of course this same sort of perversion of the frontier ethic has been fair game all along in American Westerns, and more particularly in Italian ones, which are the kind that Walker most closely resembles. But the theme has always managed to be treated without recourse to Cox's clanking ironies and fatuous anachronisms and literal-minded allegory. There is nothing inherently wrong with these devices in a Western: it is the application of them by sledgehammer that's wrong, or at any rate painful. Ed Harris, Marlee Matlin, Peter Boyle. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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