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Sorry, this movie sucks

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

You really have to sit down and think things through before you can screw up a film noir classic like John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" (1949). If you did nothing more than a bad imitation, it would still come out looking pretty good because the original is so superior. So it's hard to botch up an expertly made original film.Yet the screenplay by Richard Collins and the pedestrian direction by Delmer Daves manage to pull off this feat. They've ruined it. They've turned it into a Western, to start with. That's the fate of many other successful dramas, like "Kiss of Death." The acting by poor Alan Ladd was getting soggy by this time in his career. Ernest Borgnine and Katy Jurado aren't bad. Kent Smith is the same agreeable and unexciting actor he was in "The Cat People" fifteen years earlier.But, despite the fisticuffs and whippings and explosions and added romances and the happy ending, it's as if some vampire had crept in from a nearby sound stage and drained everyone of both blood and taste.For anyone who's seen the original, the burglary by a gang of specialists is unforgettably tense and the tension mounts, moment by moment. The crime is shown clearly and in almost complete silence. Here, instead of a complicated technical task performed by carefully selected specialists, the hastily gathered gang simply has to blow a vein of gold out of an abandoned mine. (Boom, and a cloud of dust, masking who's who.) And during this supposedly tense scene, the music pounds, and it sounds like it's from a horror film, not a Western drama, as if that vampire had dragged it along behind him.It's not a lousy movie. It's just not very good. It doesn't seem like an incident out of the Old West. It looks like a perfunctory Western movie.It begins with punishment being dished out in Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona. The ruins are still there, open to tourists. The plaques inform us that it's been misrepresented in the media, and the visitor gets the impression that it was really a rather nice place, sort of Club Med, serving lobster newburg rather than barbed wire sandwiches, and the corrections officers gave the inmates body rubs after their work out on the tennis courts.

Opening in Yuma prison this western gets off to a gritty start as we see a prisoner being flogged; he isn't one of our protagonists though; they are Peter 'The Dutchman' Van Hoek, a mining engineer framed for a robbery at the mine he worked in and John 'Mac' McBain, the conned out of the land the mine was built on. They are not friends though and Mac wants nothing to do with The Dutchman when he gets out of prison.Once out The Dutchman goes back to the mine via a disused shaft and goes to a disused section; here he heads straight to a large gold seam that he had discovered before but hadn't told the manager as he didn't trust him to reward him as promised. He takes a sample and goes to a rival mine owner and proposes that he will deliver the gold ore for smelting for $100,000; he estimates it is worth over twice that so both would be getting a good deal. To do it he must get help; Mac and an explosives expert... they must also time it perfectly so that they blast at the exact moment the miners in the active part of the mine blast so nobody notices the explosion.This western is essentially a classic heist movie the only difference is that rather than robbing a bank they are robbing ore from a mine. Alan Ladd and the recently deceased Ernest Borgnine do fine jobs as The Dutchman and Mac respectively. As with most westerns there is some female interest for the protagonists; Katy Jurado plays a Mexican woman who is rescued by Mac when set upon by thugs; this helps establish that his character is a good man at heart. The scenes in the mine are suitably claustrophobic and the outdoor scenes take full advantage of the Arizona landscape with stunning scenery and lots of towering cacti. The villains are suitably conniving making it satisfying when their plans are thwarted in the middle of a Mexican carnival. I'd certainly recommend this for fans of the western genre; especially if they are looking for something a little different.

The Badlanders is directed by Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow/3:10 to Yuma) and it stars Alan Ladd, Ernest Borgnine, Claire Kelly & Katy Jurado. It's based on W.R. Burnett's novel The Asphalt Jungle, only with a Western variation as opposed to John Huston's film noir movie of the same name from 1950. The plot follows Peter Van Hoek, known as the Dutchman (Ladd), and John McBain (Borgnine), as they get released from Arizona Territorial Prison in Yuma in 1898. Tho not together, they both head for the mining town of Prescott where they have issues and scores to settle. An intricate plan involving stealing gold from the Lisbon Mine is hatched, it's a chance to get rich, get revenge or maybe get killed?It's really just a solid piece of film, Ladd & Borgnine play it right, and with Daves adding his customary flecks of humour, it's never less than entertaining. Even the two handed romantic sub-plots {two girls/two guys you see} is competently handled, with the Jurado/Borgnine coupling given weight since they both would become married to each other the following year. Shot in Metrocolor and Cinemascope it isn't found wanting visually, particularly the work in and around Tuscon, Arizona. The problem for many will be its talky centre, this is a film that has very little action. Except for a good old punch up as Borgnine tackles three rebel rouser's types, and the inevitable double cross based finale, the film is more concerned with forming bonds and educating in the way of getting gold out the mine. The latter of which was really interesting to me personally, but it could go either way for anyone else. You will also yearn for some flesh on the bones of the villains {Kent Smith is especially weak}, because they are barely formed, thus rendering the revenge core almost redundant.It's an above average time filler, but a film where all the principals were operating safely to earn their pay. 6/10

This is one of Delmer Daves' less ambitious westerns, but also one of his best. You would not see Alan Ladd playing more complex characters, like Richard Widmark, Gary Cooper, Glenn Ford or James Stewart, which were in other Daves' westerns. But Daves was able to make the most out of it and Badlanders is an entertaining, fast paced western, about two men who have been cheated out of what belonged to them, and decide to rob a mine. They would get rich and also revenge themselves. Ernest Borgnine and Katy Jurado give the best performances of the film, both play people who have had a terrible life but find hope in each other's arms. Claire Kelly has a small, but significant role, as the mistress of the mine's owner. Badlanders deserves to be released in DVD with widescreen in order to take full advantage of the fact that it was filmed in Cinemascope.