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Ms. Stone's presence nicely underscores the genre-bending tactics of Sam Raimi, the cult director now doing his best to reinvent the B-movie in a spirit of self-referential glee. Mr. Raimi is limited by a sketch mentality, which means his jokes tend to be over long before his films end. But his tastes for visual mischief and crazy, ill-advised homage can still make for sly, sporadic fun.

The Quick and the Dead is a sly, savvy Hollywood sendup of Sergio Leone Westerns with Sharon Stone playing the Clint Eastwood righteous avenger role and Gene Hackman the heavy. You'd call it a spaghetti Western, but the budget is too high. Maybe we'd better think of it as Hollywood's first angel-hair-pasta Western. [10 Feb 1995, p.47]

As preposterous as the plot was, there was never a line of Hackman dialogue that didn't sound as if he believed it. The same can't be said, alas, for Sharon Stone, who apparently believed that if she played her character as silent, still, impassive and mysterious, we would find that interesting. More swagger might have helped.

If movies were rated solely on the basis of style, The Quick and the Dead would score highly indeed. With its dazzling photography, inventive camera angles, and throbbing bass score, the film is an experience for the eyes and ears. Director Sam Raimi and cinematographer Dante Spinotti have woven a beautifully elaborate tapestry: colorful and evocative -- and depressingly two-dimensional.

Quick and the Dead plays like a crazed compilation of highlights from famous westerns. Raimi finds the right look but misses the heartbeat. You leave the film dazed instead of dazzled, as if an expert marksman had drawn his gun only to shoot himself in the foot.

Yet all this work, all this skill, serve as little more than an elaborate setting for a rhinestone. At its core there is no passion, no sincerity of conception, nothing that might have made The Quick and the Dead into anything more than moment-to-moment stimulation. You get lots of clothes here, but no emperor. Or rather, no empress.

The Quick and the Dead takes on a more serious tone - as if, even in this loonily amoral environment, we're supposed to care about atrocities. The film builds to a satisfyingly catastrophic climax full of biblical flames and fluttering bank notes, but there's far too much dead time along the way.

The Quick and the Dead is made bearable by director Sam Raimi, who bombards us with frenetic editing, crazy-angle shots and enjoyably cartoonish cliches. But all the stylistic sleight of hand in the world can't hide the central problem: The star of the show is more Dead than Quick.

It's a mess, and one that even the pickled cowboys behind me found yawningly tedious, and that's not something I ever thought I'd be saying about a Sam Raimi movie with the word “dead” in the title.

The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.