Gunless (2010)

Paul Gross is someone I don't really care for as an actor. The reason is because he is overexposed like a lot of Canadian celebrities become. (Another one becoming overexposed: Colm Feore. Aren't actors and artist supposed to retreat and re-energise their creative juices? Anyway.) I hardly ever watched Due South. I guess because he is bland. I mean he is just there sort of like a parsnip. Don't really know what it is, don't know why people would eat them but they are there all the time.

But by sheer luck I won passes to the new Gross vehicle Gunless . I was not expecting much. I was expecting a crappy movie. A horrible movie. I thought the screen would burn up in realization of the horribleness being played on its surface. That's right; I thought the movie would be so bad it would commit suicide. But that did not happen.

Gunless is a movie with one of the most cliched movie plotlines: the fish-out-of-water plot. In this case, what happens when a bad-ass gunslinger from the U.S come to a small Canadian town somewhere in the foothills of Alberta. Why hilarity happens. He rips his pants, he wants to shoot the blacksmith for steeling his horse. But he catches the eye of the single widow lady, a Cate Blanchett knock-off. He meets the loopy locals: a doctor, a pair of three silly idiots (one of them includes a Swede), a store that is manned by a British guy on one side and a French guy selling whisky in tea cups on the other. (Obvious metaphor for Canada: Har hee har) And this being Canada there is the Ryan Gosling look-a-like playing a mountie.

It is a western but it is one that makes fun of the cliches of Westerns. The cowboys in Weterns are alwasys dirty but here people complain that Montana Kid (real name: Sean) smells. Instead of the aaloon we get the aforementioned general store owned by the French guy on one side of the counter and the English guy on the other. Sean uses the word "countenance" to describe the large picture of Queen Victoria. And there is slow motion.