Mikes Film Talk

Hell on Wheels Gunplay at Last

AMC’s Hell on Wheels has, at last, given viewers a taste of gunplay. The trouble with modern day westerns like this latest western show about train tracks being laid across the country at a snail’s pace so that the Union Pacific can stretch from coast to coast, is that the makers of the program have forgotten, if they ever knew, what makes a western good. This is not to say that the program is bad, in some ways they have tried hard to keep from relying on previous Hollywood stereotypes such as the Native American two dimensional characters used in most westerns back in the day.