Unforgiven shows us director and lead actor Clint Eastwood have learned from working with amongst others Sergio Leone, but he's not able to do better than his former director did in the golden age of spaghetti westerns.
It's a good movie. It shows us a different side of killing people than westerns have done in the mythologized genre before, but it's still a little to full of itself to pull this out in the end. A little to filled with Clint Eastwood. I wish they could have trusted others to also get across the story they are trying to tell, because I think they leaned to hard on Eastwood here. Gene Hackman gets some of the important work and also Richard Harris is given a little, but it's still too little to manage to get the balance right. After working his way through Leone's Dollars-trilogy, you would believe Eastwood had learned the importance of interactions and balance.
The movie also takes too long setting the plot, while it quite fast takes us through it. I don't mind building a story brick by brick, but once again I think the balance is off. There's a certain balance needed between the build up and the execution, and it lacks here.
And another problem I've got is the need they feel to feed its audience with a spoon. There's a lot of information we would have got correct about the main characters, without the dialogue telling exactly the same as the acting does. There's something Eastwood really should have got right thanks to his long career, but is instead another problem taking the movie down from the masterpiece it could have been if done right.
It gets credit for the original story of killings and gunslingers and the way it deals with whores and men looking for money by assassinations. I do however have to say the numbers of Oscar wins and nominations tells a sad story about movies that year, more than an entertaining story about this movie's qualities.
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