The Hit List: Kevin Costner

    Like a lot of moviegoers, the first time I really noticed Kevin Costner was when he played Jake, the hotshot young gun in "Silverado" in 1985. I'd actually seen him a couple of years before that, in "The Big Chill", but that was just a few shots and you couldn't tell it was him and he was playing a corpse. Costner's career began way before that, with something called "Sizzle Beach, U.S.A." (1974), filmed when Kevin was just 19. (It went unreleased for years.)

    Early on, he drew comparisons to Gary Cooper, something he never seemed quite comfortable with and a designation that no young actor could realistically live up to, anyway. He's always kind of gone his own way, starring in big-budget adventures, taking a supporting role occasionally, and creating what amounts to a personal subgenre, the Kevin Costner sports movie. The pictures haven't always been award-worthy, but the choices are interesting. Here are a few of them:

"Fandango" (1985/Kevin Reynolds)

"American Graffiti" for grownups. An ensemble piece about some college friends on a road trip, celebrating the end of school and weighing what comes next.

"The Untouchables" (1987/Brian De Palma)

Costner plays Eliot Ness. Robert De Niro plays Al Capone.

"Bull Durham" (1988/Ron Shelton)

Costner plays an aging minor-league catcher who romances Susan Sarandon while mentoring Tim Robbins. 

"Field of Dreams" (1989/Phil Alden Robinson)

If you build it, he will come.

"Dances With Wolves" (1990/Kevin Costner)

Kevin survives the Civil War and goes to live with the Indians. The movie won seven Academy Awards. 

"Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" 

(1991/Kevin Reynolds)

Costner's miscast as Robin Hood, but the movie's a lot of fun.

"JFK" (1991/Oliver Stone)

Costner plays Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney obsessed with finding out who killed Kennedy.

"The Postman" (1997/Kevin Costner)

Kevin's a post-apocalyptic wanderer who sees an opportunity and recreates the Pony Express.

"For Love of the Game" (1997/Sam Raimi)

Baseball again. Kevin's a journeyman pitcher who finds himself, in his last big-league start, working on a perfect game. 

"Mr. Brooks" (2007/Bruce A. Evans)

What if the Chamber of Commerce man of the year was a serial killer? Costner's darkest movie and his most unusual role.

"The Highwaymen" (2019/John Lee Hancock)

Kevin and Woody Harrelson play veteran lawmen who go after Bonnie and Clyde.

    Costner's in his 60s now, and sometimes if you look real close, you can still catch a glimpse of Jake's free-wheeling spirit, the wild-assed kid next door. More often, there's a guarded, watchful edge to what he does. Cops or cowboys, ballplayers or bureaucrats, he tends to play men who have seen enough of life to know that it can trip them up, and it makes them wary. At the same time, they take risks, sometimes crazy ones, and they can be a little too stubborn for their own good. (See "Tin Cup".) No matter how wayward they are, they're fundamentally honest. There's a sense that you know where they stand, even when (sometimes) they don't, and an underlying decency that comes across when they're on the screen.

    Cooper had that quality. And Henry Fonda. And Jimmy  Stewart. And (these days) Tom Hanks. And, in a long career that shows no sign of ending any time soon, Kevin Costner.

Ender's Game (2013)

 

ENDER'S GAME  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gavin Hood

    Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld,

    Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis

Young-adult sci-fi starring Asa Butterfield as a gamer/warrior who might be earth's only hope to counter an alien invasion. Harrison Ford plays the grizzled commander who recruits the kid, which is kind of like having an ancient Han Solo acting as a grumpy mentor to the grandson of Luke Skywalker. On its own juvenile terms, it's a pretty good movie. It's decently acted, the story's familiar enough to be instantly accessible, and the effects crew does its job. It's conventionally militaristic, but it raises some interesting moral issues with a level of intelligence you don't always find in high-tech space epics. And the notion that today's young gamers might someday possess the skill set and wherewithal to save the planet or blow it to pieces might not be so far-fetched, either. We can only wait and see. 

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)

 

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Eli Craig

    Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden,

    Jesse Moss. Chelan Simmons, Philip Granger,

    Brandon Jay McLaren, Christie Laing

So you start watching this slasher movie where a vanload of college kids head out into the woods for a little camping and partying, and they stop at the local redneck store to buy beer, and there are these two guys in there who look like backwoods psychos right out of "Deliverance" or "I Spit On Your Grave", only maybe worse. Then after they get their tents set up, some of the college kids decide to go swimming, and one of the girls disappears in the water, and the others all see the same two rednecks from the store taking her away in their boat. Then, one by one, the college kids start dying in violent, horrible ways. So you figure you know what's going on here, right? Wrong. What's cool about this movie is how it takes every slasher-movie convention you can think of and turns it upside down, and the funny, knowing way it does that. The runaway chainsaw scene is a highlight, and Tyler Labine as the rough-looking, big-hearted Dale gives the kind of performance you'd never expect to find in a slasher movie. There's no nudity and only moderate gore, but for fans of the genre, at least those with a sense of humor, a good time is pretty much guaranteed. 

Bardelys the Magnificent (1926)

 

BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT  (1926)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: King Vidor

    John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman, Roy D'Arcy,

    Lionel Belmore, Emily Fitzroy, George K. Arthur,

    Arthur Lubin, Karl Dane, Theodore von Eltz

In a role that seems made for Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert plays a retainer to the French king, who makes a bet that the can win the heart of a certain lady in three months' time. Things get complicated when he takes on the identity of a dead revolutionary and finds he's wanted for treason. You know it'll all work out in the end, after some intrigue and a few chases and sword fights and a longing look and a clinch or two. His career faded with the coming of sound, but toward the end of the silent era, Gilbert was second only to Valentino as a male romantic lead. This movie gives you an idea why. It hasn't got the brash exuberance of the Fairbanks films, but it's a good, lively swashbuckler, the production values are high-end, and wait till you see the costumes on the men of the king's court. 

Redemption Street (2012)

REDEMPTION STREET  (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Miroslav Terzic

    Gordan Kicic, Uliks Fehmui, Rade Serbedzija, 

    Jelena Dokic, Milica Mihajloric, Marko Bacovic

A war-crimes investigator is handed an old file and told to see what new information he can dig up on the case. He finds out more than he's supposed to, and things get tense. A good, suspenseful conspiracy thriller from Serbia, working on the old notion that no good deed goes unpunished, but some bad ones probably do. An impressive first feature from Miroslav Terzic, whose previous work was in commercials. Everybody loses something in this. Justice is imperfect and it comes with a cost. The grisly still photos of wartime atrocities are real.

Sex and Buttered Popcorn (1989)

 

SEX AND BUTTERED POPCORN  (1989)  ¢ ¢

    D: Sam Harrison

A hokey documentary on exploitation films of the '30s, '40s and '50s, the ones that promised sleaze while preaching salvation, tawdry tales in which much skin was exposed (sometimes) and innocent lives were invariably ruined by marijuana, unplanned pregnancy and venereal disease. The movies themselves were so bad that making fun of them seems redundant. As art they were negligible, but they were a part of the cinematic landscape, and because they were produced for peanuts and shrewdly marketed, they made money, which means somebody had to be out there watching them. Grindhouse moguls Dan Sonney and David F. Friedman are the main witnesses here. A jocular Ned Beatty narrates.

Ned Beatty

(1937-2021)

Below Zero (1930)

 

BELOW ZERO  (1930)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James Parrott

    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Frank Holliday,

    Bobby Burns, Leo Willis, Tiny Sandford

Laurel and Hardy play street musicians and there are some snowballs and a blind man and a stolen wallet and a cop. Another nice mess.

Busy Bodies (1933)

BUSY BODIES  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Lloyd French

    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Tiny Sandford, Charlie Hall

Laurel and Hardy play woodworkers in a sawmill. What could go wrong?

Beau Hunks (1931)

 

BEAU HUNKS  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: James W. Horne

    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charles Middleton

Laurel and Hardy join the French Foreign Legion. The Legion somehow survives. 

Red River (1948)

 

RED RIVER  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Howard Hawks

    John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru,

    Walter Brennan, Colleen Gray, John Ireland,

    Noah Beery Jr., Hank Worden, Harry Carey Sr.,

    Harry Carey Jr., Paul Fix, Mickey Kuhn

The great cattle-drive western starring John Wayne as a rancher whose spread covers about half of Texas, and Montgomery Clift as his adopted son, moving a herd of steers a thousand miles to Missouri (or is it Kansas?) It's one of Wayne's toughest performances, the one that proved to anybody who was paying attention that he could really act, and Clift, in his first movie, already commands the screen. You won't see anything in this that doesn't turn up in a lot of other westerns. You just won't see it done better, that's all. The film that closes Ben Johnson's movie house in "The Last Picture Show" is "Red River".

The Astronomer's Dream (1898)

 

THE ASTRONOMER'S DREAM  (1898)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Georges Méliès

An astronomer who looks like a medieval magician peers at the moon through a telescope, and all kinds of strange things happen. This appeared four years before Méliès' most famous movie, "A Trip To the Moon", and you can see some of the visual elements in the later film materializing here. For something shot in 1898, it's pretty amazing.

Down To Earth (1947)

 

DOWN TO EARTH  (1947)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alexander Hall

    Rita Hayworth, Larry Parks, Marc Platt,

    Roland Culver, James Gleason, Edward Everett Horton,

    Adele Jergens, George Macready, William Frawley

A musical followup to "Here Comes Mr. Jordan", in which the goddess Terpsichore drops down on Broadway, where a young actor-playwright is struggling to put on a show about the goddess Terpsichore. The songs are the opposite of memorable, and the leads are dubbed, anyway, but the dance numbers aren't bad, and the color design is eye-catching, with the accent on reds and browns, all apparently keyed to the color of Rita Hayworth's hair. 

Teenagers Battle the Thing (1958)

 

TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING  (1958)  ¢

    D: Dave Flocker

    Bob Clymire, Bill Simonsen, Jan Swihart, Ken Koepfer,

    Dennis Kottmeier, Ruth Ann Mannella, Mary Brownless

High-school students helping out on an archeological dig uncover a prehistoric mummy in a cave. It could be the find of the century, but then it comes to life and they have to destroy it. The End.

Desperado (1995)

 

DESPERADO  (1995)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Rodriguez

    Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Steve Buscemi,

    Joaquim de Almeida, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo

A mysterious stranger, a sort of modern-day Zorro carrying guns in a guitar case, shows up wherever bad guys need to be wasted, and bullets fly. It's a fact that the best Quentin Tarantino movies made by somebody other than Quentin Tarantino are the ones by Robert Rodriguez, whose characters spend somewhat less time talking and just s much time killing each other. They also almost always feature Danny Trejo, this time playing a guy whose specialty is throwing knives. Another fun bit: the opening scene with Steve Buscemi as a gringo in a Mexican bar, a character you just know is going to die, but somehow doesn't, at least not there in the bar. Quentin himself has an obnoxious cameo as a guy who thinks the beer there tastes like piss.