Dead Man's Revenge Reviews

Two plot lines awkwardly circle each other in this over-complicated cable-TV western released to home video. In 1876 settler Luck Hatcher (Michael Ironside) saw his family annihilated and himself sent to prison because he wouldn't sell his land to railroad boss Payton McCay (Bruce Dern). Years later, Luck breaks out, fakes his own death, and engineers a massive con game to ruin McCay. Hatcher enlists an army of citizens whose spouses, parents, sisters, horses, or dogs were murdered by McCay at one point or another (this seems to comprise the entire population of the New Mexico territory); they aim to siphon off the villain's gold and gunmen with a highly confusing scam. Meanwhile, Luck's small son Tom, who was shot those many years ago, survived unbeknownst to Hatcher and has grown up to be U.S. Marshall Bodeen (Keith Coulouris), who's also intent on revenge. Masquerading as a gun-for-hire, he signs on with McCay's gang and snoops for incriminating evidence. He and his long-lost father repeatedly get in the way of each other's plans, even after their dramatic reunion, but in the end McCay finally faces frontier justice. The familiar cast wavers between deadpan toughness and tall-tale farce, with old pros like Ironside and Dern just barely managing to hold things together. Anachronisms abound: Daphne Ashbrook plays the territory's Boston-bred liberated lady banker, a character who couldn't be more sorely out-of-place if she carried Ms. magazine and a laptop, while a telegraph operator is rendered as the Old West equivalent of a techno-nerd. Country-music sensation Randy Travis has a few scenes as Bodeen's straight-talkin' superior. For those keeping score, he logs more screen time than did guest star Travis Tritt in another 1994 release, THE COWBOY WAY. (Violence, profanity.)