Highly Overrated But Still Good

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

JANE GOT A GUN is a disappointingly grungy western that goes through the motions without ever engaging the senses. It's another film that's full of flashbacks but unlike in, say, BRIMSTONE, these feel padded and drag the snail's pace down to a crawl. The film has a murky and digital look to it which I didn't care for and indeed it feels quite depressing. Natalie Portman is the erstwhile heroine but she ends up making way for Joel Edgerton's tough gunslinger for most of the film. The film builds and builds to a climax, but when it occurs it takes place in the dark so that you struggle to see what's going on. Altogether this is rather disappointing and certainly not the mini-epic I was hoping for.

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No "may" about it. It does contain spoilers.This is an exceptional movie in the western genre for this age. As many westerns made in the last 20 years, Jane Got a Gun has a fair amount of modern thought and is a bit anachronistic. But if westerns were made to reflect the way of life for the time period they are set, we'd have a lot of very boring movies. Probably a lot fewer westerns too because reality just does not excite the audience. And, while we like this very watchable movie with a share of violence befitting the story, it did fail badly in its effort to convince us that it ever could have happened this way. It fails the effort to be a revisionist western in the likes of the 1992 movie Unforgiven. Neither Jane Ballard-Hammond nor Dan Frost match the careful presentation of retired gunman William Munny. And general continuity in the movie is absent - but that is understood to be the case these days because directors today are not learning even what continuity is let along taught to consistently maintain continuity properly. So we don't need reality. We need movies that shoot up houses to the point that they let more light in then keep out. Forget the fact that that in this movie, when the outlaw gang attacks the house late at night, when it was so dark about 20 bad guys get right up to the fence without being seen. Even a full moon on a cloudless sky would have provided enough light to see that danger. But, there was absolutely no light source outside the house. Interior views of the house show that it had many holes in the walls because of light shining through each bullet hole from outside. This light could only be seen from inside. It was necessary to skip reality in order create the impression that the outlaws had turned the house into a giant sieve. Even as Dan shoots at the outlaws on the roof from inside the house, suddenly light is visible from outside. The effect of the mysterious light lasted until long after the explosion of the kerosene filled jars in the trenches. Again, lets forget that even shooting a gasoline tank will not likely cause it to explode and that kerosene is less likely to be triggered into an explosion with a gun shot. Oh Well, it was an excellent tactic and once prepared I waited in anticipation to see what would happen with the booby trapped trenches. Spartacus did it better though. Because it is a fanciful flashback of a romantic happening, it does not matter the hot air balloon, was tethered and when untied and three adults in the basket, it floated effortlessly into the air without any source or means to heat the air inside the envelop which actually causes a hot air balloon to rise. Such air ships need constant or at least very frequent repetitions of some heat source to cause them to fly. In truth, all they can do is float along with the wind go up when the air in the balloon is hotter than the air outside the balloon. And when it is not, gravity takes over and pulls them back to earth. But Hollywood and other filmmakers seem oblivious to these basic facts and principals of aviation. This film actually falls much closer to being like Wild Wild West movies with their wild wild western imagination of what might be could be and in the movie is. When you need a romantic kiss in the clouds, you don't need reality or even correct representation of balloon flight. Besides, nobody knows how Superman manages to fly do they?So what? It does not spoil the core of the story which is really not about how Jane got a gun and how or where she got it unless the gun she got is her old love Dan Frost. It is actually about getting her revenge on the man - Bishop - who made her preform the duties of a whore, led her to think her daughter (Mary) was dead after promising "passage and protection" to a new destination and town. It is about how she had a man, lost that man, got another man by default, and lost that man, and got her first man again. Within the first 6 minutes of the movie we know that 'Ham' is a goner. He was simply a knight in ratty armor who played a protective role until he gets in deep trouble. Then the Prince comes in riding on his white horse. At least that one they got right - the white horse. How about the white horse, at the end of the movie? It's tied behind the wagon bringing the dead outlaws' bodies to town to collect the massive reward suddenly became a brown horse for Jane to ride back to the waiting wagon with the bags and bags of reward money. The white horse is found with the waiting Prince and wagon as Jane rides in and joins them. The horses must have this planned or something? I really love this movie with excitement coming from a means beyond our imagination. It's a great story about "getting sweet revenge" and eventually we see the Prince, his Lady and two daughters riding off into where the sun sets with

I literally didn't recognize Ewan McGregor throughout the entire film. I didn't know which of the outlaws was John Bishop until I looked it up on the internet later. Sadly, that's not a compliment to Ewan's acting but simply a note of how much he's changed since Revenge of the Sith. He's a talented actor - I think he actually surpassed Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi - but John Bishop didn't stand out as a character. The only thing I can remember about him is that he never killed children. That showed a hint of honour, which is good, but apart from that, there was nothing notable about the character. I couldn't even tell which villain was which because on the back of my DVD case it said Ewan was playing a guy called Colin. I kept waiting for someone to call him Colin so that I could know that the guy playing him was one of the three greatest actors in the Star Wars prequels, the other two being Christopher Lee and Samuel L Jackson.As someone who actually liked the Star Wars prequels, even though I know they're flawed, I feel like Natalie Portman wasn't as good in this film. For example, when she found out that her daughter was presumed dead whilst Jane was a prostitute, she was way too over-the-top. Yes, I get it, Jane was upset that her daughter was presumed dead but good god, could she have opened her mouth any wider in that scene? When Padme found out about Anakin's crimes on Mustafar, she was just as distraught but she didn't look ridiculous. It doesn't help that the only reason Jane stood out at all in the film was because she was the only woman who had any real presence in the story. She wasn't a particularly interesting character.The flashbacks were annoying too and it's partially because of them that the plot was so incoherent. Half the time, I didn't know what the hell was going on and only managed to make sense of it by reading a summary on the internet.Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman have both done great work in the past, including Star Wars and I have no doubt that they will do great work in the future, but sadly I think this movie represents a low point in their careers.