WYATT EARP (Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Jeff Fahey, Mark Harmon, Michael Madsen)

You know the story: man with funny moniker and funnier moustache cleans up the aptly named Dodge City and Tombstone, dispatching of the villains in legendary gunfight at the OK Corral. Wyatt Earp has already taken up some twenty hours of big screen time, and despite Kevin Costner and Lawrence Kasdan’s laudable ambitions to put the definitive story on screen, you have to question whether we really need another three and a half hours in Earp’s company. Particularly when the way they paint him, he isn’t even pleasant company. I found plenty to admire about the project, but emerged saddle sore from what amounted to a bum fight at a UK Odeon. If they insist on making films this long, they are going to have to do something about the seating arrangements.

Wyatt Earp died in 1929, and some put his pre-eminence as a western hero down to the fact that he outlived his enemies and stuck around to tell and re-tell his tale (presumably improving it as he went along). Back in the days when the Western was the staple of western cinema, Earp was one of its hardy perennials. He has been mythologised (John Ford’s My Darling Clementine and John Sturges’ Gunfight At The OK Corral) revised (Sturges’ Hour Of The Gun and Frank Perry’s Doc both painted a darker side) but generally sanitised (Law And Order , Frontier Marshal, Wichita, Cheyenne Autumn). Now that actors are back in the saddle (post Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven) there have been two further versions of the story made this year.

Tombstone was first out of the corral: an overblown, huge-scale, hit and myth affair, sketching in historical facts but never letting them get in the way of a good cliche. It suffered from the fact that so many of its all star cast wore walrus-like growths of facial hair that it became difficult to tell just who was shooting who. Yet it has acted as a spoiler, bearing the same relationship to Kasdan’s Earp as John Glen’s banal Columbus did to Ridley Scott’s superior 1492. In a box office show-down. It’s not the quality of the shooting that counts, it is the who-gets-the-guns-out first.

Kasdan has already worked over the cowboy cliches in Silverado (one of the film’s that helped establish the young Costner) and wants something more from his retelling of the oft-told tale. Shot with a Time-Life veneer, the film groans under the weight of its epic ambitions, starting back in the corn fields when Wyatt was a boy, and keeping us waiting twenty minutes for the star to assume the role. Meanwhile, as Judge Earp, Gene Hackman, who has hardly been out of the saddle since Unforgiven, is saddled with a succession of laboured monologues. Much of the dialogue in Wyatt Earp sings with Kasdan’s customary wit and insight, but Hackman’s pop-psychological catechism of lines is an ominous portent, a strained attempt by Kasdan to rather obviously paint in the formative strands of Earp’s character. “Nothing counts so much as blood,” Pa Earp tells his young son. “The rest are strangers.” This is then repeated, just so we make sure we realise why Wyatt and his brother’s remain inseparable to the end.

As a psychological portrait, Wyatt Earp just doesn’t cut deep enough. Costner’s Earp begins free of facial hair with a bit of zip in his performance but after an early, life-altering tragedy (the death of his newly wed pregnant wife) he allows all the fun to be knocked out of him. Never a particularly expressive actor, he spends the rest of the film with a straight poker face, all simmering rage and buttoned-down emotion. Which is an interesting take on the character, but not for three whole hours, and not when we have to rely on old Pa Earp’s homilies for insight.

The film’s strengths instead rely on the sheer professionalism of the whole enterprise, with occasionally startling violence, a vivid conjuring of the dirty old west and moments of acerbic humour. Dennis Quaid seizes on the always interesting part of consumptive gunfighter Doc Holliday, putting in a rock and roll performance almost as if Tom Waits were crossed with Keith Richards and given a gun. It would have been all the more invigorating if Val Kilmer hadn’t done a similar scene-stealing act as a dandyish Doc in Tombstone.

Wyatt Earp is an ambitious, laudable movie, adult and intelligent where so many westerns are lightweight, but in tackling such a familiar tale in such relentlessly heavyweight fashion, it may be a case of too much, too late.