This new Kurt Russell Western sounds really promising

Who doesn’t like Tombstone? No one, that’s who. (You hear me, commenters? No one.) The Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer film about the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral may have had a troubled production (including the dismissal of original director Kevin Jarre several weeks into filming, and his replacement by George P. Cosmatos, who allegedly was just a “ghost-director” for Russell) but the resultant picture remains one of the best Westerns of the 1990s.
I enjoy the Tombstone experience—and the Kurt Russell experience in general—so my curiosity was piqued by a report in Deadline about Bone Tomahawk, a new Russell Western that is getting ready to go into production. Today, Patrick Wilson and Matthew Fox both joined the film’s cast, which also already includes Richard Jenkins. The trade describes the film as:

“…the brutal tale of four men attempting to rescue a group of captives from a band of cannibals who live on the edge of civilization. Wilson will play Arthur O’Dwyer, a thoughtful cowboy whose rise to the foreman position of a cattle outfit is interrupted by an unfortunate accident that reshapes his life in unforeseen ways. Fox has the role of John Brooder, an eloquent gentleman whose whose dark inclinations have put him and his polished weapons at the very edge of the Western frontier.”

Mmm, “dark inclinations” and “polished weapons” sort of makes the part sound like Fox’s bad guy in Alex Cross, which is one of the great crazy performances of the last couple years. (He played a psychopathic hitman/MMA fighter named Picasso because he leaves Mad Magazine-style fold-in drawings on his victim’s bodies.) Also, his character is named John Brooder. Do you think he’s going to brood a lot in the movie guys? I mean he has to, right? It’s right there in his name! So this is even better news than it initially seemed.

Bone Tomahawk (great title, by the way) was written by S. Craig Zahler, a Black List-anointed screenwriter making his directorial debut. Hopefully things work out better for him than Jarre on Tombstone. If they do, this could be one of my most anticipated movies of next year.