A Tale of Two Guns

8/26/2022

If I had to guess I would say that director Justin Lee is aiming for a meta-western, and A Tale of Two Guns (a title that must have sounded great on paper but which makes little contextual sense) certainly is very self-aware – even a little too much for its own good; here is a movie where the score in a scene set in a saloon (though according to the sign outside it is a “club” rather than a saloon) is Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” There is also a lot of talk about “the end of an era” and “a dying breed” and “figur[ing] out what men like us are gonna do in this life” now that “The organization known as the Cowboys has come to an end.” As a matter of fact, there is a lot of talking in this movie, period, and quite a bit of it is rather incomprehensible. For instance, we have such

4/6/2026

**_Hardened men fighting and willing to die in the desolate Southwest_** I saw the writer/director’s “Any Bullet Will Do” from four years earlier and was really impressed, so I wanted to try one of his later films to see if he was a consistent filmmaker. It turns out he is. While I like the other one better due to the wintry Montana milieu and spunky Jenny Curtis, this one is worthy in its unique way. For one thing, it’s more serious; not that “Any Bullet Will Do” was a comedy, but it did feature winks of dark amusement. Secondly, the setting is totally different, consisting of the bleak Southwest desert and the people trying to live there. The eponymous guns involve a lawman with a long gun (Ed Morrone) and a former outlaw with a six-shooter (Casper Van Dien). Tom Berenger is also o