Fantastic!

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

There is a line from Eric Bana in "Blackhawk Down": Once the first bullet gets fired, politics is out the window. This film is a remarkable achievement, but the beginning was a little iffy. I don't know if they filmed it in sequence but the dialogue in the beginning was a little too stiff and archiac. They steer away from it as the movie goes on. Perhaps the actors had to find their characters, the cast is quite young.Ang Lee did something incredible: He made an American Civil War kitchen sink drama, with 3 big action sequences that are exceptionally well staged and edited.I didn't have a problem with Jeffrey Wrights character. If anything, he brought realism to the flick, real life is messy and not as easy as black and white, good and evil. Sometimes you are where you are.As with all Ang Lee films, I appreciate how he lets things breathe. A few seconds of the camera lingering on nature, that's one of his trademarks. He always manages to capture beautiful contrast.

Really enjoyed it, created the atmosphere and general feeling of the period without transposing modern morals or standards. It's the lesser known story of the U.S. civil war, the irregulars. This was the dirty war within a war what we'd now call guerilla or even terrorist attacks. Some certain notorious characters of the west did their apprenticeships in these groups. Did seem to lag a little midway, but it might have been to introduce new players, and give more depth to others. This the cast performed excellently, direction was good but maybe editing could have been more incisive.

Dynamic action, riding, shooting and killing, for about the first half hour, even though I couldn't properly tell who was who, but then it seemed to slow down and peter out into nothing much, involving a lot of tediously uninteresting talk. What a relief to read the negative reviews, and note the low rating. I was afraid I was missing something, since I couldn't be bothered to keep watching after the first hour or so. Nothing seemed to happen, at considerable length. I skipped a lot, and it still felt as if I'd seen everything. I registered a baby and a shotgun wedding.Maguire, who was playing the lead character, because of his manner and the shape of his face and eyes, seemed to be half asleep most of the time. Several of the characters were shown either sleeping, lying down, or just waking up, dressing or undressing. They were difficult to tell apart. Maguire didn't appear to initiate any action: things were simply happening to him. The sound was bad on my disc, and there were no sub-titles to help me discover what was going on. After the violent opening, the whole thing became passively pointless and slow. What was the meaning of the title ? Rave reviews on the disc cover.

A Civil War epic about the Missouri-Kansas conflict. Tobey Maguire stars as a Dutch immigrant who joins the guerrilla side of the Bushwhackers (Confederates) against the Jayhawkers (Union). This film is beautifully produced, but not very engaging for much of its run. Maguire in the lead doesn't help at all. He can be a decent actor in the right circumstances, but he doesn't fit into the Civil War that well. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon were both considered for the role, and Damon, in particular, would have been great in it (I think DiCaprio was still kind of a weak actor at the time, though he would have been better than Maguire). The film gets a bit better as it goes along, particularly when the main thrust of the story, the relationship between Maguire and a black man fighting on his side (Jeffrey Wright) emerges. Then there's the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, which is a fantastic and horrifying centerpiece. Wright gives a fine performance, but my favorite performance in the movie belongs to Simon Baker, who plays Wright's master. Yes, Jewel co-stars. She might be the reason that no one took this movie seriously when it first came out, but she's not half bad, really. The film is baity as Hell and even has a Jewel song during the end credits, over-ripe for Oscar glory.