Unforgiven (1992)

This movie kind of blew me away. I had always seen the cover of this on those lists like the AFI's GREATEST MOVIES or TOP 20 OSCAR WINNERS and put it mentally in the same category as Driving Miss Daisy or Forrest Gump: big budget Hollywood oscar winners that were beloved in the early 90's, but then lost flavor over time. Now I personally like Driving Miss Daisy, but dadgummit if Unforgiven ain't miles above it in every aspect. I read a review somewhere that stated Unforgiven is "a funeral for the western." Indeed it is. I suppose Dead Man gave the genre some more esoteric, smaller-level subverting a few years later, but Unforgiven really focuses its intentions and gives the western a proper burial.

Eastwood plays Bill Munny, essentially a washed up version of The Man With No Name, from the "Dollars trilogy", except this character is mean, amoral, or at least was...he's given up "the drink on account of his wife" and become a pig farmer with his two young children, leaving his bankrobbing, murdering years behind him. He's talked into doing one more job, though, by a kid who wants more than anything to be like those romanticized caricatures of gunslingers that Eastwood has embodied in countless movies.

So the movie's plot follows thusly, and is really straightforward, but it's the dialogue and depth of the characters that makes it so compelling. Stereotypes are inverted, and morality gets pretty murky. The bad guy in Unforgiven would be the good guy in any typical western, and vice versa. Little Bill Daggett, played ruthlessly by Gene Hackman (two years before he played a very similar character in The Quick and The Dead, in some ways the antithesis of Unforgiven), represents the death of the old ways of the west, in which thieves and killers roamed free and pillaged towns as they pleased. He used to be one of these outlaws himself, but now, as the town sherriff, he's determined to keep his town free of crime, albeit through intimidation and fear. And Eastwood's Bill Munny is the dying spirit of those old ways, a man whose time has come and gone, but who has to gather that gunslinging, lawless spirit in the face of injustice. Morgan Freeman plays Ned, Munny's former partner-in-crime, and the two of them have amazing onscreen chemistry as they struggle to get back on the saddle (literally) for this last stand.

The film chugs along confidently, exploring and debunking the cliches that the old Hollywood westerns thrived on, and finally we arrive at the final shootout, which I had to watch twice because it was so awesome. Seriously, one of the most badass endings of all time. I had to show my girlfriend the clip on YouTube a couple hours later. The ending of this movie is right up there with the endings of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest or Rocky for me, in terms of pure emotional impact. It's the moment I was hoping throughout the movie. It's so simple and predictable, yet so effective. And the dialogue makes it clear that everything that's been said in a scene like this has been repeated so much it's lost meaning:

"I'll see you in hell, William Munny."
"Yeah."

Bill Munny has responded to that cliche so many times, he no longer has anything to say besides "yeah."