Frank Ross (John Pickard) heads into town to handle some business where he’s shot dead in cold blood by his own assistant, Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey).  Frank’s daughter, Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), wants justice.  She therefore goes out and hires who she thinks is a man who has ‘True Grit’, Marshall Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) to hunt down the man who killed her father and bring him to the law so he can be judged and hung.  La Boeuf (Glen Campbell) is also on the trail of the same man and finds himself tagging along to make sure he gets his fair share of the reward that he’s been working so hard for long before this Ross business occurred.

When I began this marathon I had many misconceptions about how ‘lame’ westerns are.  I must make it very clear how opened my eyes are now, which is the biggest reason why I do these marathons.  Unfortunately I haven’t done (or even worse completed) many of these marathons as yet, but I hope in upcoming years of blogging and movie watching to come I will have mastered the art of the movie marathon.  Even though I’ve now been able to actually name more than one western I love I definitely still see a lot of clichés that are pretty much embedded in the genre that I’m not a huge fan of.  Here is lies my biggest problems with True Grit.

True Grit starts out simple enough and it sets up the revenge plot that the movie is.  However when we actually get around to the enacting of the revenge, i.e. Mattie hiring Rooster to help her go out and I find myself uninterested.  Usually what I find most interesting about these movies is the way these groups of individuals, whether it be Blondie and Tuco (from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) or Chris and Vin (from The Magnificent Seven), interact with each other on these long journeys across the land.  Here however I found myself less interested in the drunken John Wayne and how he just generally pissed off La Boeuf and his employer.  It just felt like generic had finally figured me out for foolish.

When it came to the action sequences I was pretty surprised at how enjoyable they were, especially the final battle between Rooster and Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall).  It gave me a moment in the film that I could actually bring myself back to consciousness for a reason beside having to write this review.

I was so happy to get some great moments with good actors in this movie towards the end with the introduction of Pepper and Moon (Dennis Hopper) that I almost decided to start enjoying the movie.  However in the end I guess this movie was always destined for the mediocre result that it started out with.  Maybe to someone who went to the theatre as a six-year-old with his father to see The Duke do what he does best then I can understand.  But that kind of nostalgic flavour is lost on me who was never there to have those memories to work off of.

IMDB says 7.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 93%

I say 5.0/10