Les Mayfield’s “American Outlaws” is a retelling of the Jesse James legend targeted toward the Restless Youth of Today. You know this because it’s filled with dopey anachronistic dialogue, the action sequences are so carelessly worked out that it’s impossible to figure out who’s doing what, from where, or why, and it features a Moby song. It also reassures us that James was a supernice guy, with principles and everything. He was also kind of like a rock star, but with a gun. And he shot people, but he didn’t really mean it. Picture 1860s Missouri as Ft. Lauderdale during Spring Break and you’ve got the idea.
Really just a marketing tactic with a plot, sickly and pale, trailing wearily in its wake, “American Outlaws” is a listless mess. An ensemble adventure featuring a bevy of ostensibly hunky male leads — among them the Irish actor Colin Farrell, acclaimed for his role in last year’s “Tigerland,” as Jesse, and Gabriel Macht as his older, smarter brother, Frank — the picture lurches along uncertainly in jerky fits and starts. The setting is the post-Civil War South. The James brothers, along with the help of their pals the Younger brothers (Scott Caan and Will McCormack) and assorted other ne’er-do-wells, flit about the Missouri countryside robbing banks and trains willy-nilly, parading around constantly in public but never getting caught.
But their motives are pure: The evil railroad magnate Thaddeus Rains (played by Harris Yulin in primo Simon Legree facial hair) has been trying to buy up Missouri farmland at ridiculously low prices, thus ruthlessly forcing families off the property. The last straw is when the Jameses’ mom (Kathy Bates, in a sassy, eye-rolling performance that seems to be sending up the whole movie) perishes after a group of Rains’ thugs blows up her house.
That does it! The only thing left for the Jameses and the Youngers to do is to trample the countryside stealing money and terrorizing citizens. Detective Allan Pinkerton (Timothy Dalton, valiantly trying to come off as something livelier than a piece of cardboard) has been employed by Rains to push the railroad company’s agenda on citizens and to capture the James-Younger gang; mostly, he just watches their antics, frustrated and amused.
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