True Grit (2010)

My love-hate relationship with the Coen brothers films continue with their 2010 remake of the John Wayne fronted classic True Grit. As is the case with most remakes, the originals are better. This just had a bit of a different tone than the original and i felt like it suffered because of it. The main issue is Jeff Bridges stepping into John Waynes role as U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn.

Wayne doing the role was perfect for him. He was funny at times and serious at others. Whereas Bridges didnt really convey an comedic relif and often times the accent he was using was very difficult to understand, often going minutes of converstaion without understang a single bit of the dialogue. Matt Damon stepped into a doomed role as Texas Ranger LaBeouf. The character was annoying when Glenn Campbell did it in '69 and Damon couldnt do much better, very poor casting in my opinion. The real break-out and truly great performance was given by Hailee Steinfeld, in her debut film, where I think she actually did a better job in the role of Mattie Ross than Kim Darby did in '69. And even though they give top billing and went out and got a know actor in Josh Brolin for the role of Tom Chaney, he barely gets any screentime as the role did in '69.

The film starts with the Tom Chaney killing the father of Mattie Ross, who then arrives to retrieve her fathers body and close out all of his outstanding affairs. When she learns that have yet to catch Chaney she enlists Cogburn to seek him out and eventually LaBeouf insterts himself into the manhunt.

The film was meidocre at best, I deffinetly reccomend seeing the John Wayne version instead. It has a different tone and was just all around more enjoyable compared to this remake. The one truly good thing to come out of it is Steinfeld who after giving a great performance should see a lot more work in her future as long as she doesn't squander it like many child actrs do.

There is talk of an Oscar for Jeff Bridges for his role, I may however disagree, but it would interesting if he won because John Wayne won the Oscar for the role at the 1970 Academy Awards show. It would seem as though it is just an automaticly great role is he wins, hell even if he nominated.

True Grit recieves 6 "Is that you John Wayne? Is this me?''s...out of 10.