Maddie's drug-overdose death is thrown in by the narrator with no payoff; no great poker scene despite the Oriental; faro is never explained; odd edits make the day unclear; the unexplained killing spree after Doc kills Johnny Ringo; the unnecessary Robert Mitchum narration; the Billy Zane and Dana Delaney characters are hard to understand
Maddie dying of a drug overdose is thrown in for no reason: she could have had a happy ending, or died in the middle so the heavily invested addiction plot paid off, rather than the narrator announcing it; one reading is that it exists to forgive Wyatt for running off with Dana Delaney, making him a widower anyway, and the real problem is that her character does not need to be in the movie.
Josephine, whom Wyatt ended up with, reportedly spent the rest of their life together trying to bury that part of his past, inserting herself into the Wyatt Earp story where Maddie had been.
It is upsetting that there is no awesome poker scene despite the Oriental, beyond the early game where a man gets stabbed; a heated Wyatt Earp, Powers Booth and Kilmer poker game would have been a better choice than the twelve-minute theater scene, and 1880s poker is what one host wants to watch.
Faro (transcribed 'Farrow'), the game the Earps actually came to make money on, a weird French game casinos no longer offer, is never explained in a film that over-explains everything; Kilmer's line that he does not play games of chance is noted, though he plays plenty of poker, which may be a natural game.
Weird edits make it night twice and unclear whether it is the same day, attributed to Cosmatos just trying to get the thing out; one host's only nitpick is how the others assessed Dana Wheeler Nicholson's performance.
The biggest problem: after Doc kills Johnny Ringo, an amazing scene, there is a lot of killing nobody understands, presumably hunting down Ike, the last third turning into a lynch mob like the end of Cobra where the heroes kill everybody; it all leads to Doc succumbing to TB, Wyatt's final sit-down with him and the happily-ever-after with Josephine, but that third-act interlude is strange.
Earlier asides: the Billy Zane and Dana Delaney characters are not totally understood, and Robert Mitchum's narrator is called completely unnecessary, the cliche of how a Western gets told.
The Saul Rubinick award (as transcribed) is given to Dana Wheeler Nicholson as well; one host refuses to accept that in a movie with Powers Booth, countering with Booth, and the pick is repeated as Dana Wheeler Nicholson; Booth is defended as good, if more Booth than needed, and Thomas Hayden Church (transcribed 'Daniel Church') is said to be closer to the award than he is.
The case against her: in bed after Wyatt gets back from the picnic, asked how she is feeling, she is so high she is laughing at her own misery, and that is not good acting.
The defender insists the other two are both wrong: calling her overacting in a film where Powers Booth wears a sash and sashays around town on opium shooting people in the chest, and in which Michael Biehn appears, makes no sense. — Chris Ryan
Further candidates: Billy Zane, who overacts in every movie and is not good, though in fairness that is literally the point of his character, an actor, and he played that same melodramatic man in his next nine movies, including as a serial killer on a boat; Sam Elliott overdoing the Western thing, rejected; and Robert Mitchum's completely unnecessary narrator, parked as a nitpick.
The dispute resumes during nitpicks: the hosts attacking her are told she is alive and reachable through her agent or Twitter, and that it is weird to be most bothered by a woman in three scenes while the men ham it up like boar's head; the defense is that the part is poorly written with no payoff since the narrator simply tells us she died; the attackers say the award is not a demerit and her laudanum-soaked scenes are just bad, with no emotional journey.
