I've seen Clint Eastwood's The Unforgiven hailed as the anti-western or even the last of all westerns. Well, I don't know how you improve on this film within the genre, but I hope someone will try, so that this won't be the western to end all westerns.
This film takes all the conventions of westerns and tosses them in the air, letting the chips fall where they may. When you have the good guys (or are they supposed to be the bad guys? I don't know!) pondering what it means to kill a man, doubting the very motives they had for setting out on the journey that ended in the death of two men, you know this is not the western of Gary Cooper and John Wayne.
There is no black and white here. Everybody descends to the toilet-bowl vortex of violence and sadism, to the point that you don't know who are the good guys and who the bad. As Will Munny says, "We've all got it comin.'"
This film takes all the conventions of westerns and tosses them in the air, letting the chips fall where they may. When you have the good guys (or are they supposed to be the bad guys? I don't know!) pondering what it means to kill a man, doubting the very motives they had for setting out on the journey that ended in the death of two men, you know this is not the western of Gary Cooper and John Wayne.
There is no black and white here. Everybody descends to the toilet-bowl vortex of violence and sadism, to the point that you don't know who are the good guys and who the bad. As Will Munny says, "We've all got it comin.'"