True to its title, the approach of this three-hour-and-ten-minute Western is comprehensively biographical. And ploddingly, pacelessly, shapelessly, flabbily so. The spectator's heart is apt to sink right off the bat, when, after a pre-O.K. Corral teaser, he is sent back, as if for some remedial education, to meet the teenage Wyatt Earp, currently in the process of trying and failing to run away from home to join the Union army. The point to be made about that, and indeed about the entire first half, is that we do not need to have it "explained" to us why Wyatt Earp felt as he did about the family and the law, any more than we need to know what happened at mother's breast to make Achilles so self-centered or what went on in toilet training to make Hector so socially conscious. The formative psychological factors diminish the hero -- diminish the archetype -- diminish the icon -- even as they inflate the movie named for him. This is the stuff of legend. Let's get on with it. Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Michael Madsen, Gene Hackman; directed by Lawrence Kasdan. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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