Unforgiven

Director: Clint Eastwood
1992
RT score: 97%
My score: 6/10

By now it should be obvious that one of my weaknesses in life is movies. As a teen movies were my one escape for the reality of how uncool I was and as an adult I have continued watching movies even as I learn to understand how unnecessary being cool is.
With that in mind, I have found that I am prone to picking up movies at $5 (or less) all the time. Unforgiven, being my brother in laws favorite movie and one I remember being pretty good when I saw it nearly 20 years ago was one such movie I picked up under these circumstances.
What I had forgotten though is that the film has long stretches that are painfully dull. How I managed to forget that is beyond me considering it's directed by Clint Eastwood whose movies I often feel like are over-rated, poorly paced and frequently feature long stretches that add nothing to the overall story.
All of that is true in this western tale of old guys hired to exact revenge on behalf of a towns brothel which believes it was done wrong by the towns sheriff.
The best part of the film is the towns sheriff who is played by Gene Hackman. His character is not your typical villain but is more Machiavellian in his desire to sacrifice justice in order to maintain peace in the wild west. His unwillingness to provide harsh punishment to a man who beats a prostitute leads to the brothel putting out a bounty on against their attacker.
An aged Eastwood and Morgan Freeman come to answer their call. There's plenty of soul searching on their journey as they also serve as mentors to a young kid who has no business being there. We eventually see a confrontation after 90+ minutes and then the films final 5 minutes feature the Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood pulling off victory in an impossible to believe final shoot out.
I suppose the lesson here for me is to pass on movies I may honestly be adding just to improve my position as a movie snob. The film is a best picture winner with an impressive RT score and I'm not going to pretend that it's a complete loss. But if I am ever in the mood for a western I think I would be far more likely to go with the Coens True Grit or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which are far superior films to this.