Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
I wouldn’t describe the 2001 … movie?… Texas Rangers as a bad film. Sure, the action western shoot ’em up starring James Van Der Beek, Dylan McDermott, and cowboy hats currently owns a 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and led the San Francisco Chronicle to wonder if the “script pages had been tossed in the air and randomly assembled,” but the film is such a beacon of cinematic apathy that I’d say it’s more pointless than bad.
Now streaming on Showtime, Texas Rangers eschewed anything remotely resembling plot, historical accuracy, or how human beings looked, sounded, or acted in the 19th century to instead turn the elevator pitch of “the wild west… but with sexy teen idols” into 90 minutes of cinematic action best described as “wait… what?”
The “plot” follows a ragtag group of youngsters who band together after the Civil War to form the Texas Rangers. This collection of cowboys (not baseball players) are led by former preacher and current grump Leander McNelly, played by Dylan McDermott, who I can only imagine was tricked into this film via blackmail, elaborate dare, or a Wile E. Coyote-type painting the words “This way to the western-themed episode of The Practice” over a tunnel. What bothers me about this movie is that it had promise. The Beek, McDermott, Ashton Kutcher, Usher, and Alfred Molina in the west? You don’t need a lasso to get me to watch those dudes cowboy-it-up for an hour and a half, but Texas Rangers woefully misuses its talent. Nowhere is that more evident than in the case of Rachael Leigh Cook. At about the 50-minute mark of this perplexing jigsaw puzzle of boredom, Cook just shows up and is like, “Hi, I guess I’m in this movie now too.” Failure to unleash the volcanic razzmatazz that is Rachael Leigh Freakin’ Cook, who just two years prior tore the house down in She’s All That, is a dereliction of one’s civic duty as a human being.
The one aspect of the film you’d expect to be competent, the action sequences, are also a mess. The combination of quick cuts and similar outfits makes the myriad battle scenes thematically confusing. I’d posit that the uncertainty could be an allegory for the unforgiving fog of war, but that would mean anyone even remotely associated with this film (?) had a thought more complex than “the guns go boom” during production.
Texas Rangers could have been so much better. It has terrible yet fun cult movie written all over it — just ask American Outlaws — but as you can imagine, things didn’t go according to plan.
The film was in development for years, and a number of early drafts were written by Apocalypse Now scribe John Milius. According to Wikipedia, Milius got “pretty close to making the film” but couldn’t get Tommy Lee Jones approved as the star. The script was rewritten and eventually bought by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax. Milius wasn’t a fan of the changes, to put it mildly.
“They don’t have any sense of responsibility,” Milius said in an interview with The Guardian. “They’d make a film about anything if they thought it would make some money for them. I think they should give Harvey Weinstein to the Taliban. I’d like to see him on the other side. I’d like to hunt him down in a cave.”
It should be noted that this interview took place in November of 2001. Soo…
Gracefully moving on, here’s my personal nomination for the next Mount Rushmore.
Filmed in 1999 and originally scheduled for an April 2000 release, Texas Rangers was shelved until November of 2001. Released with minimal advertising, the movie, which had a $38 million dollar budget, would go on to gross only $763,740.
The legacy of Texas Rangers is that of disappointment. It’s such a bleh film that it makes Wild Wild West look like Citizen King. The band. Because back in the late ’90s/early aughts, the entire modern western genre was desperately hoping for better days.
That’s the type of outro this movie deserves.
