I would rather be stretched on the rack than sit through this atrocity again. Blake Edwards, the very talented comedy/musical director who gave us The Pink Panther and Victor/Victoria, lays an egg with this unbelievably stilted attempt at a mystery/comedy/film noir/western. Maybe that is one of the main problems, that Sunset never knows exactly what it's supposed to be.
A (barely) pre-Die Hard Bruce Willis wanders around aimlessly trying to find some chemistry with a good-natured James Garner, who plays an impossibly young-looking Wyatt Earp now on the prowl (such as it is) in Hollywood in the late 1920s. A prostitute is brutally murdered (hilarious, ha ha) and naturally nobody knows who did it...hmm, you don't think it's the Malcolm McDowell character, who aside from playing his role from the pure Snidely Whiplash school of acting, has raped and/or murdered every female character in the film. Gee, Bruce and Jim, do you think you MIGHT have a clue here? After various grisly rapes, murders, shootings, a bashed-in nose with a frying pan, etc., the "heroes" put together the clues served to them on a silver platter and quickly get ready for the climax, which is about as surprising as the sun setting (no pun intended) in the west. By this time no one in the audience gives a damn who did it (they've known for the last 40 minutes), and one is left with the valiant hope that something dreadful will happen to the "heroes" before they mount up and ride off into the...well, you get the idea. Blake churned out a bunch of crap in the late '80s, but "Sunset" is unquestionably the nadir of his decline. Thinly-plotted, badly acted, and incompetently written, it's sad to see such a great director sink to these depths.
A (barely) pre-Die Hard Bruce Willis wanders around aimlessly trying to find some chemistry with a good-natured James Garner, who plays an impossibly young-looking Wyatt Earp now on the prowl (such as it is) in Hollywood in the late 1920s. A prostitute is brutally murdered (hilarious, ha ha) and naturally nobody knows who did it...hmm, you don't think it's the Malcolm McDowell character, who aside from playing his role from the pure Snidely Whiplash school of acting, has raped and/or murdered every female character in the film. Gee, Bruce and Jim, do you think you MIGHT have a clue here? After various grisly rapes, murders, shootings, a bashed-in nose with a frying pan, etc., the "heroes" put together the clues served to them on a silver platter and quickly get ready for the climax, which is about as surprising as the sun setting (no pun intended) in the west. By this time no one in the audience gives a damn who did it (they've known for the last 40 minutes), and one is left with the valiant hope that something dreadful will happen to the "heroes" before they mount up and ride off into the...well, you get the idea. Blake churned out a bunch of crap in the late '80s, but "Sunset" is unquestionably the nadir of his decline. Thinly-plotted, badly acted, and incompetently written, it's sad to see such a great director sink to these depths.