‘Wyatt Earp’ at 30: Kevin Costner’s Western Epic Lost The Battle With ‘Tombstone,’ But Did It Win The War?

Kevin Costner brings a new western to movie theaters this week with Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, the first in a planned four-part epic (two chapters are definitely happening, and he wants to do two more). It feels like the star’s attempt to make his own Yellowstone on a multiplex-sized canvas; westerns have long been a major part of Costner’s repertoire as an actor and a director, and his obvious personal interest in them has become one of the most endearing aspects of his persona. The pioneer/native conflicts that kickstart Horizon will doubtless bring to mind Costner’s debut as a director, the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves. But Horizon is also coming out right around the 30th anniversary of another, less fondly remembered three-hour western: The 1994 biopic Wyatt Earp.

Earp was something of a spiritual successor to Dances with Wolves in 1994, despite the fact that Costner himself did not direct it. Instead, he reteamed with Lawrence Kasdan, who gave him an early western role in his 1985 film Silverado. Their ambitious reunion traces the life of lawman Wyatt Earp from his childhood to his friendship with Doc Holliday (played by Dennis Quaid looking like Hugo Weaving) to the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral to glimpses of what happened after that much-mythologized event.

The big budget and impressive scope made sense, given that it returned Costner to his beloved Old West setting for the first time since his Best Director Oscar win. Following Dances with Wolves, he had starred in another historical smash, albeit a more fanciful one (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves); another Oscar darling (Oliver Stone’s JFK); a more contemporary hit (The Bodyguard); and a collaboration with Clint Eastwood (A Perfect World) that followed Eastwood’s own Oscar triumph, also a western. All in all, this added up to quite the hot streak; A Perfect World may have disappointed at the box office, but time has vindicated its quality. The same cannot be said for Wyatt Earp, which in retrospect looks like a speed bump, warning sign, and ditch, all in one.

Satisfying as it would be to reclaim it, Wyatt Earp hasn’t gained much luster over the past three decades. If anything, placing it in the greater context of Costner’s career makes the movie look worse; it’s a gorgeously appointed big-budget studio movie that proceeds at the lugubrious pace sometimes unfairly associated other Costner pictures. Dances with Wolves develops slowly, especially by contemporary standards, but feels like it’s painting a portrait of a character, a time, and a place, building up its unlikely relationship between a white man and an American Indian tribe. Kasdan’s movie, on the other hand, explains how Earp got to the showdown at the O.K. Corral in such bafflingly tedious detail that the story loses all momentum or sense of character by the time the anticlimactic scene arrives. The movie is most interesting in the aftermath of the big gunfight, when Earp is both vilified by townsfolk who believe his family was to blame for the conflict, and consumed by vengeance with a grim single-mindedness that suggests maybe he was at fault, after all. (There’s an nighttime ambush on and around a train that, with its steam-filled shadows, previsions a beautiful sequence from 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.)

Rather than attempt to reconcile Earp’s straight-arrow sense of right and wrong with his obvious propensity for violence, though, the movie appears to assume that Costner’s mere presence will be inherently fascinating enough to tower over any possible dissonance. It’s trying to offer steadfast movie-star comfort to an audience that had already handled the darker tones of Unforgiven (which also offers stronger surface-level genre thrills, if that’s what you’re after). This misplaced trust in Costner results in one of his most inert and charmless performances, where his acting style shifts from unfussy to opaque. It’s often reductive to call a three-hour movie boring, but that’s exactly what Wyatt Earp is. In Kasdan and Costner’s telling, it’s a boring movie about a boring guy.

It didn’t help that a fleet, entertaining, and popular version of the Earp story had come out just six months earlier. Tombstone, a western starring Kurt Russell as Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, became a hit in late 1993, after a tumultuous road to the screen that at one point involved Costner playing Earp. When Costner decided to strike out on his own for a more dedicated Earp biopic, he attempted to convince other studios to pass on Tombstone. The film eventually prevailed at Disney and, to the surprise of many, at the box office, where it handily outgrossed the eventual numbers for Wyatt Earp.

Earp came out in June 1994, and looking at its immediate competition, it’s tempting to ascribe some of its failure to a culture becoming more attuned to the whims of children. The second weekend of The Lion King dominated Wyatt Earp’s opening, and the live-action version of The Flintstones still lingered in the top five. Even fellow top-five resident Speed could be categorized as a different sort of youth movie; after all, it runs on pure action-movie adrenaline. But that same summer saw established middle-aged-guy stars drive Clear and Present Danger and Wolf to success. For that matter, it was an unusually western-heavy season, too, with the comedies Maverick, City Slickers II, and The Cowboy Way occupying the top ten the weekend the Costner film was released (though only Maverick was a substantial hit).

Whether it was this particular movie, a surprise oversaturation of westerns, or a wealth of more appealing options, Wyatt Earp slowed Costner’s previously rocketing career to a trudge echoed by the movie’s terrible pacing. He remains a star to this day, of course, and would go on to make several of his best movies not long after the Earp disaster. (Tin Cup was only a couple of years away.) Hell, the following summer’s Waterworld did better than people remember. But it did feel like Costner playing defense, with a de facto companion piece to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, while his actual directorial follow-up to Dances with Wolves, The Postman, was a costly bomb in 1997. Before 1994, Costner was making movies that felt current and contemporary. Most of what came later felt more retro, even if that was often the intention. In a way, it feels like Wyatt Earp threw Costner’s career so far back that he never caught back up.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.