This series resided on my DVR for a full year before viewing. I'm confused. Maybe I lost sight of the forest for the trees. This film seems to do nothing more than what Hollywood consistently does to musicians, portray them as a bad cliché. While production standards are well executed, those are the only things I give kudos to on this production. Costner and Paxton are the standouts in the film, as they are the only two that the film /script allows for any real character development. As there are so MANY players in the film, the rest of the performances get a bit muddied from time-to-time. Im amazed how many night sequences were in this film. I am from WV and I can tell you traveling at night in the woods of WV is simply not possible, especially during that time. The pacing of the film is inconsistent, with at least an hour possible to truncate from its length. What sticks out the most to me, aside from the rushed dialog, is the persistent casual murderous intent and reactions to death. Its a wonder our population grew at all, as everyone seems to look for some minuscule reason to kill, and only care about it to exact revenge to kill some more. Its hard for me to believe that just 150 years ago we were such a nation of savages and sociopaths, at least drug dealers kill each other for business reasons. Or is it, we ( West by-God Virginians actually weren't as bad as the film portrays but, once again, are stereotyped for entertainment purposes? Lastly, the still-framed epilogue of the film runs by so fast and is so incomplete, that a lot of the real questions never get answered, in other words 5 hours of film, and then a summarization that last only a few seconds and barely addresses the key points of story, characters, and outcome. I don't need to see this one twice.
Review of Hatfields & McCoys
