I saw Lonesome Dove a long time ago and liked it enough to want to see more. With Comanche Moon just coming out, I figured it was a good time to catch up on the whole saga, so I started with Dead Man's Walk, chronologically the first story in the series.I've only watched the first episode, but so far I'm impressed with the cast and disappointed with the acting and the pretty much everything else.
Concerning the cast: I've always liked David Arquette and I've really been enjoying Eli Stone this Spring so seeing Jonny Lee Miller in some early work here is a treat. Then there's F. Murray Abraham as a wannabe pirate, Keith Carradine, Brian Dennehy, Harry Dean Stanton, Jennifer Garner, and -- though he hasn't appeared yet -- Edward James Olmos.
Unfortunately, none of these folks (maybe Olmos will be the exception) is doing a great acting job. Arquette does a pretty good Robert Duvall impression, but it's obvious that he's doing it and it's distracting. Miller and Garner are early in their careers here and don't look comfortable reciting their lines. In fact, no one really does. The dialogue's not awful, but no one's convincing me that these are real people in real danger.
Some - if not most - of that is the director's fault. I think this was a Hallmark mini-series, so I'm not expecting it to be graphic, but it's frustratingly mediocre in the way it portrays violence. When there's this many guns shooting and arrows flying, there ought to be some excitement, but the action is super toned down. With that kind of laziness in the action, you have to wonder how much direction the cast really got. I mean, when even F. Murray Abraham and Harry Dean Stanton are boring, it makes you wonder who's really at fault.
I'm not going to give it a rating until I'm done with it, but so far it's a blah Western and really suffers in comparison to Lonesome Dove.
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