Hard Ground

If you are familiar with the movies that Hallmark Entertainment makes and/or distributes, you can probably guess that this particular movie misses the mark. To be fair, not everything about the movie is bad. It's always nice to see Burt Reynolds or Bruce Dern, and we get them both in the movie. They give the movie some charm and they have some good chemistry together. But not much else in the movie works. The feel of the movie is not right, from the unauthentic-looking props to the real generic locations. The bad guys in the movie are surprisingly boring, and they don't do much more than shoot people while chortling. The biggest flaw in the movie is that the movie is very uneventful, moving at a very slow pace. It feels like a half hour TV western stretched to 88 minutes. Let this one ride by.

I didn't think really good Westerns were made any more but I gave this one 9 out of 10. It's that good and, incredibly enough, it's made for TV!

A word of warning however, this film is quite violent. In fact it's the most violent film I've ever seen on the Hallmark Channel.

Burt Reynolds and Bruce Dern play friends/enemies/brothers in law as they track down and kill an extremely savage man who murders men, women and children any time he feels like it which is often. He's supported by a gang of bad guys and a corrupt Mexican general.

The film has it's share of colorful characters as well as Amy Jo Johnson for some female interest. She packs a 10 gauge double barreled shotgun.

Well, I Happened to see this movie.

I'm not a particular Western-Fan, but when a movie is good, then its good no matter the genre, and vice verse. This one is quite dull (even if it had been a Sci-fi flick).

Im not gonna go deep into details, but my opinion falls somewhere similar to the lower scored comments here.

The actors feels a bit wooden, the sound-effects are bad, the action moments lack "umphf", the bad guy is stupidly, annoyingly portrayed and overacted, the relationships between the characters is so embarrassing, the special effects ... well there is not that many SFX, etc.

If you really have the crave for "Wild West" movies, go see "Young Guns" instead, or why not "Deadwood" - another TV-production that really oozes quality. But if you're in some personal quest, that you have to see every western there is, well, go ahead. Or if you do some research like - How Burt Raynolds Carrier is going down ... then this also could be helpful.

I Gave it a "2", mostly because the horses did some nice acting. Acting like embarrassed animals in a low budget badly script, dumb movie, or was it acting?

Overall, you don't miss anything by avoiding this.

Here we have two fine actors and that's about it. Burt Reynolds and Bruce Dern are back in the saddle, and given nothing to work with. The villain, David Figlioli, is a cartoon-like character. The script appears to have no direction, as it wanders all over the place, leaving the viewer with questions that are explained along the way only to expand the running time. But by far the biggest negative in "Hard Ground" is the total miscasting of Amy Jo Johnson. Instead of looking, sounding, or acting like a frontier woman, she comes across as if she just stepped out of a designer jeans commercial. Whenever she is on screen, she drags the movie right down to the mat. What you are left with is some nice location photography, and Reynolds and Dern struggling mightily to keep things from falling apart completely. - MERK

An average oater, with some nice scenery. This movie at its worst is better than 'reality' shows at their best. Worth a look while you work on your laptop. Bruce Dern is believable, if not memorable. Burt Reynolds always does a good job, and does not get the recognition he deserves. Martin Kove proves he is one of the top character actors around. Amy Jo Johnson didn't work at all -- maybe if the makeup artist had dirtied her up a bit instead of keeping her a fashion plate, she may have worked out better, but I doubt it. David Figlioli seemed like he tried to hard to be a bad guy. Maybe he should stick with movies like Rock Monster, where overplaying the role can be overlooked.