Shockingly good. Douglas' sure hand keeps this almost moment-to-moment remake constantly fresh by sheer dint of sturdy color-and-scope craft, aided and abetted by this murderer's row cast. Frankly I think Alex Cord out-Dukes the Duke as the Ringo Kid here. The script fleshes out some of the relationships between the characters -- perhaps unnecessarily, but never unproductively. And the surprisingly violent action sequences are just as good as the original, if not better and occasionally even more dynamic simply because of what was technically feasible a quarter century later.

I mean, is STAGECOACH. Honestly I'm more of a Hawks man and this isn't even close to my favorite Ford (WAGON MASTER, if you're interested) but it's a glorious upping-the-ante in the archetype department, one that held on through spiritual and formal innovators like Mann and Peckinpah, and oh man those stunts and well it just rips. Thomas Mitchell in this might be my spirit animal.

Great job turning this deeply idiosyncratic, sprawling story about collective trauma and history into Serious Beetlejuice.