Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

christopher-underwood Director, Walter Hill was keen to make a western, following his successes with The Driver and The Warriors the previous two years but I don't feel this really is anywhere near as good as the following years Southern Comfort. That starred Keith Carradine and it is he and his brother David who take top honours here. The Keach brothers are fine and similarly the Quaids but although it must have seemed a good notion to have three pairs of siblings play in this Jesse James tale, I'm not sure it works as well as it should have. The men rob banks and then fade out whilst in-between they talk a lot about family and marriage and mothers but it is not too convincing. The film only looks good now and again and it is hard to care for anyone here.

rod-ruger Too many reviewers extol this western. Apparently those folks have not seen The Wild Bunch, Silverado, the many Eastwood spaghetti westerns, or other excellent westerns. Or, positive reviewers simply have no taste. I rented Long Riders on Amazon. I fast forwarded through the dancing, extraneous bar scenes, family gunk, blabbering, etc. This 90 minute movie easily condenses to about 20 minutes. The rest is fluff. If you are determined to watch it, check it out of your library for free. Even then, you will waste your time. The movie wasted its stars and offered simplistic dialog. Most of the violence was clearly written in to attract the action freaks. Wild Bunch had a lot of violence. However, it all seemed a logical part of the movie.

Wuchak Released in 1980 and directed by Walter Hill, "The Long Riders" is a Western about the James/Younger Gang, former Confederate bushwhackers in Missouri during the Civil War who kept on fighting after the conflict, although they didn't officially become the notorious gang until 1868, at the earliest. The movie details the events over the next dozen or so years during which the gang robbed banks, trains, and stagecoaches in Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, West Virginia and, lastly, Minnesota. Speaking of which, to all intents and purposes the James-Younger Gang was destroyed with the ill-fated Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery on the first day of hunting season on September 7, 1876, with only the James brothers escaping. They resurfaced in Nashville, Tennessee, with restless Jesse recruiting a new gang by 1879. The new group continued the gangs' criminal legacy in Alabama, Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi. Ultimately, Frank moved to Virginia where it was safer while Jesse moved his family back to Missouri with the Ford brothers living with them as protection. By this time, Bob Ford had already had secret negotiations with the Missouri governor to bring in Jesse and shot him after breakfast in Jesse's living room on April 3, 1882. There are some inaccuracies in the movie, e.g. Jesse James wasn't as wooden as James Keach portrays him, Belle Starr wasn't a prostitute and the bar knife fight never happened. But, what the heck, Hill gets the gist of the story right. The James/Younger guys, thankfully, are not painted as a bunch of good-guy Robin Hoods; but rather as outlaws who steal & kill for a living, justifying it by their bitter experiences in the Civil War. Nor are the Pinkertons made out to be the bad guys; they make some stupid mistakes, as is common, but they ultimately catch their quarry.The gimmick with this film is that they used real-life brothers to portray the outlaw brothers: James and Stacy Keach as Jesse and Frank; David, Keith and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim and Bob Younger; Randy and Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed Miller; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Bob Ford. Pamela Reed and James Remar are also on hand as Belle and Sam Starr.The bar knife fight between Cole Younger and Sam Starr is an intense highlight. Although this particular fight never happened, fights LIKE IT did (Heck, when I was a teen a friend of mine got stabbed in the gut in a bar knife fight in a small town in Ohio; so I personally KNOW it happens).One striking aspect of this film is that it's more-so an Eastern than a Western; the events of the film take place in the technically Eastern states noted above; not to mention that it was filmed largely in Georgia of all places (Parrott and Westville) and also in Rusk, Texas, which is in EAST Texas. These Eastern locations are nothing short of magnificent. It's just nice to see the East utilized in a Western storyline.David Carradine is notable as Cole Younger. Remember him as humble Caine in "Kung Fu"? Well, his character here is the express opposite of that noble character. James Keach is also potent as Jesse James; James portrays Jesse as a grim, hard man. You can easily see him leading this tough band of outlaws. In addition, Stacy Keach is likable as always.Although Pamela Reed plays her role of Belle Starr very well, Belle comes across as lifeless and sleazy (which is to be expected if you're a prostitute); I wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole. Lastly, James Remar is perfect and memorable as the half-Indian Sam Starr. The cinematography is top-of-the-line."The Long Riders" is a modern 'Western' even though it was released in 1980. For verification, I recently let a friend borrow it, a friend that refuses to watch "old" movies (i.e. anything made before 2000); he watched it and loved it. When I told him it was from 1980 he was aghast; he couldn't believe it. Lastly, the movie maintains your attention even after seeing it several times. That, to me, is a sign of a truly good film.The movie runs 98 minutes.GRADE: A-

virek213 The American West has provided an endless amount of true-life stories that have become legends of our nation's history. Inevitably, of course, this means that men that are branded as "outlaws" have become a part of all that. One such gang of outlaws was the one led by Frank and Jesse James that terrorized a large chunk of the Midwest in the years following the Civil War, and right up to the first years of the 20th century. That legend, unsurprisingly, has seen its share of films being made by Hollywood. But perhaps the most provocative of the bunch is the one made by action film stalwart Walter Hill at the turn of the 1980s. That film was THE LONG RIDERS.This take on the venerable outlaw legend is notable for having sets of brothers play the outlaws: Stacy and James Keach play the James Brothers'; the Carradines (Keith, Robert, David) are the Youngers; the Quaids (Dennis and Randy) play the Miller Brothers; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest portray the Fords. During the 1870s and 1880s, these men rack up a series of felonies so long and so brutal that they become oversized legends of their time, and quickly become the focus of the equally legendary Pinkerton detective agency (the frontier forerunner to the FBI). But the methods the Pinkertons use to hunt down the James/Younger boys are not only unconventional, but even criminal at times themselves, earning the scorn of a lot of people, especially those close to the boys in the states of Missouri and Tennessee. The end result is a blood-soaked affair that climaxes when the gang attempts to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in a raid that only nets them a lot of bloodshed since it was all set up by the Pinkertons and that the entire town was waiting for them. All three of the Youngers are so badly wounded that the Jameses abandon them. Those that are not wounded are eventually captured by the Pinkertons. Only the Fords were ever offered a deal: to turn state's evidence and track down the James Brothers, which they indeed took.Made on what was a fairly sizeable budget for a Western ($10 million), THE LONG RIDERS did, however, score quite well at the box office; and as a result, the film was perhaps the last great Western to be a hit before the monstrous critical and box office debacle of HEAVEN'S GATE came along at year's end in 1980, all but decimating the Western as a genre. Hill and his crew were sticklers for authenticity, and it shows in every frame of the film, with each set of acting brothers doing convincing turns as the outlaws, and with Pamela Reed giving a fine turn as soon-to-be-outlaw cowgirl Belle Starr, a loose associate of the James/Younger gang. Given the period in which it was made, no one should be surprised that the outlaws are seen as the heroes, and the Pinkertons as more or less the heavies (since their methods of hunting down the gang are terribly unethical at times). And since Hill wrote the screenplay for director Sam Peckinpah's 1972 crime thriller classic THE GETAWAY, and loosely studied under that director, no one should be shocked either that THE LONG RIDERS is a fairly violent film, with bloody shootouts rendered in slow-motion (though Hill's editing style is not as cascading, nor quite as memorable, as Peckinpah's was for, say, THE WILD BUNCH).Filmed primarily on locations in northern California, Texas, and Georgia, THE LONG RIDERS benefits greatly not only from its casting and its period authenticity, but also from the rustic, down-home country/folk music score by Americana legend Ry Cooder, who would work again with Hill on films like STREETS OF FIRE, SOUTHERN COMFORT, TRESPASS, JOHNNY HANDSOME, LAST MAN STANDING, and GERONIMO: AN American LEGEND. It is sad that the Western genre had basically entered its twilight by the time THE LONG RIDERS was released, and that HEAVEN'S GATE (released, ironically, by the same studio, United Artists) would all but bury it in the ground for a long time, because this film has a lot to recommend to it. It belongs squarely in the traditions that both Peckinpah and Sergio Leone set forth in the 1960s, that in which the demarcation between black and white was really quite gray, and where right and wrong were determined by the participants, and not a half-baked sense of morality. Hill, who can sometimes be an uneven director, nevertheless understood that better than most, which is a big reason THE LONG RIDERS is one of the best of the latter breed of that most distinctly American of film genres.