Quigley Down Under (1990)

 It's 1990 and the fam is down in Vernal visiting grandma, dad agrees to take us kids to a movie, we want to see The Rescuers Down Under but can only find Quigley Down Under. 10 year old me, thinking it very unlikely that there would be two movies in theaters at the same time with 'Down Under' in the title, suggests that maybe this is an alternate name for the Disney cartoon; dad knows better, we watch stuff at grandma's instead.

I would not have appreciated Quigley at the time, but three and a half decades later it's pretty alright. Tom Sellek, trying to have a movie career, plays Matthew Quigley, a late 19th century, American cowboy sharp shooter who travels to Australia for a job offer from rancher Alan Rickman (this during the actors smarmy hayday). Turns out the job is to help Rickman genocide some aboriginal's. An enlightened Quigley punches his would be employer out a window for this suggestion. In short order he and a somewhat delusional prostitute called Crazy Cora (under rated beauty Laura San Giacomo) are left to die in the Outback. The two rise to the occasion and with the help of the natives bring justice to Rickman and his hired hands.

Relocated to a different continent, this is still a pretty standard Western, thirty years earler John Wayne or Henry Fonda would have made good Quigley's. Takes a bit to get going, but a comfortable watch. Movie was not helped at the box office by coming out around the same time as Dances with Wolves, or The Rescuers Down Under for that matter. **1/2