Return of the Gunfighter

I'm not sure if "Return of the Gunfighter" is a sequel to "The Gunfighter" with Gregory Peck but if it is it's a far cry from the original.

The overall story was fair enough and could even be said that it was good. Ben Wyatt (Robert Taylor) is a retired, yet still fast, gunfighter that's out to find justice for his friend Luis Domingo. He uses Luis's daughter, Anisa (Ana Martin), to find his killers. Along the way he befriends Lee Sutton (Chad Everett) who becomes an essential character.

It would have been an OK to good movie if it weren't for Anisa and Lee Sutton. They were two very simple characters that I found nauseating. Anisa, the simplest of all, was the naïve, protected, childlike character with the features to match. She had to be the cleanest, softest-skinned Mexican-farmer's daughter ever. That just helped complete the innocent virginal image.

Lee Sutton was a simpleton of a different kind. He was the young, dumb, full of you-know-what kind of simpleton. I will say that he partially evolved by movie's end but not enough to shake off that first impression.

"Return of the Gunfighter" is about gunfighting after all just like kung fu movies are about kung fu. It's almost as if the characters get in the way of the true objective. No characters were particularly captivating, they were all just a means to an end.