Bad Girls Reviews

"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." If that's not what the West--or at least the western--is all about, it's hard to imagine what is. But the BAD GIRLS of Jonathan Kaplan's revisionist romp have a bone to pick with the frontier status quo. A feminist Western about bad men and the women who beat them at their own game, BAD GIRLS is an appealing twist on conventions that entertains without ever really amounting to much. Tough-talking, sharpshooting Cody (Madeleine Stowe) and her friends Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson), Eileen (Andie MacDowell), and Lilly (Drew Barrymore) are prairie prostitutes who are run out of town after Cody shoots an upstanding citizen who's abusing Anita. Cody's been saving her money in a Texas bank, and Anita owns a piece of land, so the girls decide to open a lumber mill. As luck would have it, they arrive at the bank just as Cody's vicious old flame, Kid Jarrett (James Russo) is robbing it with his gang. The law can't help, so the bad girls strap on their pistols, get into cowboy drag and saddle up. Eileen gets thrown into jail, but, with the help of Anita and Lilly, sweet-talks her way past William Tucker (James LeGros), the innocent rancher who's been assigned to keep an eye on her. Cody goes to Jarrett's camp to get back the money, but Jarrett beats and abandons her on the trail, where she's found by handsome stranger Josh McCoy (Dermot Mulroney), who takes her to a Chinese herbalist. McCoy--who's got his own score to settle with Jarrett, whose gang murdered his parents--Cody, and the others all hole up at Tucker's ranch, and Tucker, who has fallen in love with Eileen, agrees to help them. Most of Kid Jarrett's gang escapes the first shootout, but Cody's crew captures Jarrett's father, Frank (Robert Loggia). Frank taunts McCoy about his parents' murder, and McCoy kills him in a fit of temper. During an attack on Jarrett's stronghold, McCoy is captured. Cody tries to bargain for his release, but Jarrett kills him, and the women open fire. When the dust settles, the Jarrett gang is dead. Eileen opts to stay with Tucker, and the others ride off together. Until the late 1980s, the western was, by consensus, a moribund genre, done in by fashionable cynicism and widespread distrust of traditional American icons. But a new wave of revisionism lifted a flotilla of sagebrush sagas--YOUNG GUNS, DANCES WITH WOLVES, UNFORGIVEN, et al.--each with its own claim to novelty. BAD GIRLS is another chapter in the re-winning of the West, this time claiming it for liberated women, and, like 1994's POSSE and TOMBSTONE, BAD GIRLS' variations on classical western themes and images are only skin deep: at heart, it's as conventional as can be. From the drunken sheriff to the bullwhip-cracking bad guy, the saucy saloon girls to the hellfire-spouting preacher, the gang's all here. The fun of BAD GIRLS lies in the puppyish delight Stowe, MacDowell, Barrymore, and Masterson take in turning their tired old roles on their heads. Together, they're the archetypal motley band of righteous outlaws: Stowe the quiet loner with a quick trigger finger and a past, Masterson the innocent who has to toughen up to survive, MacDowell the looker with surprising spine, and Barrymore the cut-up who's rock solid under fire. But they're girls, and their matter-of-fact gunslinging is a pleasant antidote to decades of cowering prairie madonnas and corseted wantons who get what they deserve. Kid Jarrett, the kind of old-fashioned, rootin' tootin' hombre loco who used to wipe the screen with the nominal heroes, doesn't stand a chance, and it's no fault of James Russo's; Cody and her girl gang are so endearing that his bluster seems all hollow posturing. When the final shootout erupts, it's only a matter of time before the macho corpses start landing in the conveniently located pigpen. One can make fun of BAD GIRLS for its politically correct hindsight, which goes far beyond the central gender switching conceit--the guns, the horses, the dusty towns, and unsettled wilderness are all the stuff of countless matinee westerns, but the townspeople are black, white, and Chinese, the prairie is being tamed not by the railroads, but by barbed wire, and the smartest, most capable cowboys around are a bunch of whores--but the legend of the West is a work in progress, always being rewritten in light of the present. BAD GIRLS is good fun whose greatest weakness is a certain narrative slackness: the film cries out to be just a little tougher, a little brisker, a little sharper. But it's a pleasant diversion, and another tile in the mosaic that is the movie canon of the West.