In 1995, Sam Raimi had become known as the director of a rather quirky and original horror film that, in spite of being shot full frame with terrible actors, displayed a talent for composition not seen in some time. However, he had also given himself a rather large black mark in the form of an attempt to be "cool" with a horror-comedy where violence has no visible consequences, and everyone speaks like a reject from a teen soap opera. Individuals singing Raimi's praises will have you believe such was the best thing Raimi had done at the time. Unfortunately, what it really was was Raimi demonstrating that he had run out of ideas that he could call his own, and was now getting his repertoire fed to him by the most disingenuous money-men of the industry. In spite of a heroic attempt a few years later to return to the style of creating characters with The Gift, The Quick And The Dead can be labelled the moment where Sam Raimi, the innovative new voice behind The Evil Dead or Darkman, was gone forever.<br /><br />While it is all but taken as read that a Sam Raimi film will be a hamfest with more clichés than a film-making class nowadays, nobody was quite prepared for how he displayed the fact in The Quick And The Dead. They say that when you put together a film in which the characters are the story, you best have good actors behind them. Unfortunately, with the exceptions of Russell Crowe, Lance Henriksen, and Gene Hackman, every actor in this film comes off as being utterly terrible. Even Lance, who by this time had the making of great characters out of terrible scripts down to an art, comes off as a complete non-entity here. Hence, I have no hesitation at all in placing a share of the blame upon writer Simon Moore. For all of his faults, Raimi at least knows how to salvage a character in the editing process. And when your cast includes the men who played Bishop or Lex Luthor, it is hard to blame the problem on the actors. Henriksen's performance, however, will get the more ignorant placing the blame on the cast.<br /><br />Sharon Stone makes that an easy mistake to make, unfortunately. From the second she enters the town set, she makes it abundantly clear that she has seen one too many Sergio Leone films and thought "I can do that". And to be fair, for those who have not seen The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly or Once Upon A Time In The West, Stone appears to be doing a good job. Compounding the problem, however, is that neither writer nor director seem to have any idea which scenes they should not be stealing from. The final moment when Harmonica's flashback is completed in Once Upon A Time In The West is such a gob-smacker in its original form that smart directors know not to try and ape because it was more than just a means to an end. It was literally the final word. Unfortunately, Raimi tries to one-up Leone's signature scene in a flashback where Hackman forces Stacy Linn Ramsower as the young Ellen to shoot her father dead. Not only is the tone of the scene entirely off, the total absence of any proper lead-up completely undercuts the drama of the sequence.<br /><br />Equally terrible is Leonardo DiCaprio as Fee, or The Kid as he is called during the film. DiCaprio has finally proved in such pieces as Blood Diamond or The Departed that he can act, but after The Quick And The Dead, anyone could be forgiven for thinking DiCaprio came straight from a high school drama. During the entire film, The Kid is only a whiny brat who starts to bawl when things do not entirely go his way. When he meets his end, the scene is so perfunctory, so devoid of weight, that while Hackman lends some much-needed credibility with his totally unmoved reactions, Stone destroys the whole thing with some incredible overacting. It is not entirely DiCaprio's or even Stone's fault, as the script gives them absolutely no development or buildup for this moment. DiCaprio is clearly in over his head playing a character that the writer and director apparently could not give two figs about. The sad thing is that with all the weight Stone was throwing around on the set, it would have done wonders if she had recognised this problem and addressed it.<br /><br />This partly leads me to believe others may be right when they say that The Quick And The Dead needed another hour of footage (or script) in order to accomplish its goals. With more time and development in the early stages, the constant parade of characters both minor and major could have had some impact. Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, and minor ones at that, the deaths in The Quick And The Dead are merely a parade of images. Perhaps The Quick And The Uninteresting would have been a more appropriate title. And when one remembers that this film was put together by the same man who gave us such a haunting, creepy atmosphere in The Evil Dead, or such a horrifyingly real tragic hero in Darkman, it makes The Quick And The Dead such a bitter pill to swallow. Not that we honestly could have expected much more. The Western as a genre has been thoroughly tapped out, and it would take a truly incredible film to give it new life. The kind of film that The Quick And The Dead is not.<br /><br />The Quick And The Dead is a four out of ten film. I have seen plenty of films that are worse, but in light of what its director used to be capable of, I have seen very few that are so incredibly frustrating.