This is, as the title serves warning, a youth Western, which would seem for starters a cunning enough way to lure the bulk of Eighties moviegoers back into theaters to view the newborn of this vanishing breed. And the very young screenwriter John Fusco, who earlier had written the Crossroads script about a young white urban musician trying to tap into the black Southern folk tradition, would seem to be a credible candidate to build a bridge between today and yesterday. On both counts there can be no objection to filling the heroes' saddles with some of the Hot Young Stars of the day (Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, but mainly, dominatingly, screen-hoggingly Estevez, with all his contemporary psycho thrill-seeking intact). One could even go further and wish that this youth movement, once begun, had spread into other areas of the film -- into other saddles, that is -- so that the oft-told story of Billy the Kid and his gang (here cruelly wrenched from a sort of frontier halfway house for teen runaways) had not been turned so thoroughly into a Them-and-Us generational clash. The full crassness of this strategy comes out in the peyote-taking episode, with its recreational vomiting, and climbing onto a horse ass-backwards, and general air of frat house on Friday night. Despite any of that, the movie could still have kept a firm grip on one of the prime assets of the Western genre -- its easy access to scenes of action -- if it had had some other director than Christopher Cain. He myopically gropes his way through such scenes by means of closeups and telephoto shots (which have the same effect as closeups: no surrounding space). You can see, from approximately the vantage point of Mr. Magoo, people firing guns, people falling down, etc., and you come thereby to the general awareness that some sort of action is currently in progress. You cannot, as the phrase is, follow it: it just keeps smacking you in the face like the handle of a rake on whose teeth you've just stepped. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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