I loved Lonesome Dove and looked forward to a new western with Robert Duvall. In this miniseries he resurrects his performance--and character--from the former movie, albeit with a different name. Thomas Haden Church is fantastic--I loved his voice--filling the Tommy Lee Jones slot, and naturally there is a good-hearted prostitute love interest for Gus--I mean Uncle Print. Plot-wise, there are few surprises and no revelations. We know where this movie is going and how it will get there from the first half hour and the last half hour or more of exposition seems tacked on.
If you expect character development development to fill in the long hours where plot leaves off, you might as well expect a western without hanging bodies or burning houses. Henry Gilpin, the fiddle player who early on joins the two men moving 500 horses from Oregon to Wyoming, is given a handful of lines and no back story and it's unclear why he's in the movie at all, except perhaps to provide bits of the none-too-interesting soundtrack.
Likewise, the two bad guys are virtually interchangeable in appearance, motivation and evilness (though one is taller and has a bad-guy moniker), and the second seems to arrive simply to fill the void of the first's departure.
Finally, could not someone have instructed Mr. Duvall how to pronounce Oregon place names such as The Dalles, Celilo, Malhuer County and, worst of all, Oregon itself--the state where the main characters supposedly live and from which they begin their journey? If they had indeed filmed in Eastern Oregon rather than Alberta, these errors might have been avoided. Skip this and watch Lonesome Dove again.
If you expect character development development to fill in the long hours where plot leaves off, you might as well expect a western without hanging bodies or burning houses. Henry Gilpin, the fiddle player who early on joins the two men moving 500 horses from Oregon to Wyoming, is given a handful of lines and no back story and it's unclear why he's in the movie at all, except perhaps to provide bits of the none-too-interesting soundtrack.
Likewise, the two bad guys are virtually interchangeable in appearance, motivation and evilness (though one is taller and has a bad-guy moniker), and the second seems to arrive simply to fill the void of the first's departure.
Finally, could not someone have instructed Mr. Duvall how to pronounce Oregon place names such as The Dalles, Celilo, Malhuer County and, worst of all, Oregon itself--the state where the main characters supposedly live and from which they begin their journey? If they had indeed filmed in Eastern Oregon rather than Alberta, these errors might have been avoided. Skip this and watch Lonesome Dove again.