Tombstone may be the only true ’90s western. Of course, there were other westerns released in the 1990s; it’s actually the decade that saw the most westerns win Best Picture Oscars, accounting for 20% of the decade’s ten selections. But those two winners (also big hits) were by dedicated actor-director practitioners of the form: Kevin Costner, whose Dances with Wolves was the most prominent but by no means his only foray into the west (another one, in fact, drops next summer); and Clint Eastwood, whose Unforgiven served as an elegiac farewell to the genre (and also an unofficial one, if you count Cry Macho as a western of sorts). These were major movie-star projects, as was Mel Gibson’s TV adaptation Maverick. Other ’90s highlights of the genre, like Desperado and The Quick and the Dead, are specific gunfighter riffs with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility. City Slickers and Wild Wild West are overtly comic variations. (City Slickers, with its use of a cosplayed western narrative as a means of helping boomer males self-actualize, may actually be the most ’90s western.) But Tombstone stands alone as a traditional western, with movie stars but not superstars, that turned into a sizable (and surprising) hit back in the final week of 1993.
This wasn’t supposed to be the hit Wyatt Earp movie of the mid-90s. That was, naturally, supposed to belong to ol’ Kevin Costner, whose Lawrence Kasdan collaboration Wyatt Earp would flop the following summer, seemingly at least in part because Tombstone beat it to the punch. It doesn’t seem like timing should have mattered, though: As well-liked as Kurt Russell has been for so much of his career, in 1993 he was coming off Unlawful Entry and Captain Ron, while Costner was on a hot streak of Oscars and hits, interrupted only by one of his best-ever performances in Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World. Accordingly, Russell’s retired version of Earp, who moves to the town of Tombstone with his brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), doesn’t exude movie-star mythology the same way a new Costner western would.
That’s not just because Val Kilmer steals the movie as Earp’s sweaty but unflappable (and tuberculosis-ridden) pal Doc Holliday, or because Russell spends much of the movie flanked by the similarly charismatic Paxton and Elliott – though all of that certainly contributes to Russell’s comparable modesty. With the accumulation of 30 years, that becomes even more pronounced, as Tombstone’s formidable acting talent overflows even further to 2023 eyes. You’ve got Paxton’s fellow James Cameron alumni Michael Biehn and Stephen Lang; the legendary Charlton Heston in a minor role and fellow legend Robert Mitchum contributing some narration; character actors like Powers Boothe and Lost star Terry O’Quinn; Billy Zane, why not; and, in small parts a few years ahead of their breakthrough performances, Billy Bob Thornton and Thomas Haden Church. Though not everyone here was equally famous three decades ago, this extremely deep bench still allows Russell’s Earp to emerge from the narrative gradually, rather than immediately pop – despite being the most famous character in the movie, played by one of the most famous actors in its ensemble. Earp doesn’t especially want to serve as Tombstone’s new lawman – Virgil is more adamant about confronting a cowboy gang menacing the town – but eventually he becomes more or less the only man for the job.
So yes, on its face Tombstone lacks the star-as-auteur distinction of so many films from Costner or Eastwood. But it was, in fact, a passion project for Russell, who shepherded the film through the firing of its initial director (screenwriter Kevin Jarre) and the hiring of Rambo: First Blood Part II director George Cosmatos, to the point where Russell is often presumed to have ghost-directed the movie himself. What both Russell and Kilmer have said in recent years is both vague and definitive: The movie as it exists would not have come out the same way (or possibly at all) without Russell.
And revisited 30 years later, it often feels like Russell’s Tombstone shouldn’t work as well as it does. Its odd structure places the most exciting shoot-out, the famous confrontation at the O.K. Corral, in the middle of the movie, following a good deal of agreeable but not exactly propulsive meandering. Much of the action from the back half of the picture then happens in montage. The friendship between Earp and Holliday was apparently extracted from a longer, more detailed script, and at times it shows, feeling less like the subject of the film than (like Earp) what’s left standing after a lot of shooting and riding.
It’s exactly the qualities that make Tombstone a less knowing, less inventive, less delightful ’90s western than, say, Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead that probably made it a vastly greater attraction for audiences then, and probably now, too. It’s an old-fashioned western with enough violence to distinguish it from the genre’s peak era, not precisely modernized but updated just enough that it now reads as nostalgic for two forms: the long-dormant western and the less rare but still precious Dad Movie. As much as Kevin Costner was a vastly bigger star in 1993, Tombstone definitely feels of a piece with the Kurt Russell who made Unlawful Entry, Breakdown, Backdraft, Executive Decision, and so on.
In other words, Tombstone is not the period at the end of a sentence in the manner of Unforgiven; it’s a less demanding way of reappraising frontier justice, connecting the dots of righteous killing in the less morally complicated westerns with the forced hand of the ’90s action picture. Despite all of this, though, Holliday’s tearful goodbye to Earp – from the quiet of a hospital bed, rather than the aftermath of a big gunfight – forms an elegy anyway. It’s a less fraught goodbye to the genre, gentle enough that you might not notice right away. It leaves Wyatt Earp dancing in the snowfall with his new wife (Dana Delaney), and then, as the credits roll, back in the saddle with images from earlier in the film, a stark contrast to the still silhouettes that close Unforgiven, with the characters fates rumored-about and offscreen. It might seem like a little bit of a cop-out by comparison, but Tombstone isn’t wrong, either: There will always be more westerns, even if they’re fewer, or further between, or less traditionally minded. Paradoxically, it sometimes seems like Tombstone is the only big western from its era that truly believes this.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.