High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane (1980)

Good movie but grossly overrated

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Will Kane and wife Amy return to the town of Hadleyville one year after the events of High Noon. Yes, Will returns to a town that turned its back on him and left him to fend for himself against killers after everything he had done for the townsfolk. Why? Because he's going to buy some horses. A stupid contrivance that completely disregards the point of the first movie's story. Anyway, the town has since gotten itself a new marshal and he's not a nice guy. Will, of course, butts heads with him and decides to stick around town for awhile.A made-for-TV sequel to one of the greatest westerns of all time? This doesn't have disaster written all over it at all! I watched this with the same contempt as most people who saw the beloved original, but I did try to separate comparisons and view it as its own entity. That's pretty much the only way it can be enjoyed on any level. If you even think of Gary Cooper while watching this, you'll likely turn it off in disgust. As a sequel to a great film, it's a hot pile of garbage. As a story all its own with characters who just happen to share the names of those from the other film, it's a barely watchable, completely pedestrian affair, lacking any originality or complexity. It's like a pilot for a generic TV western from the '50s or '60s. It's directed by the guy who did Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, another made-for-TV gem starring Lee Majors. The script is by Elmore Leonard, although I would never have guessed it. As far as the cast goes, Majors is wooden as ever, David Carradine hams it up as a superfluous character wanted for murder, and Pernell Roberts sleepwalks through his role as the villain. Katherine Cannon gets the unfortunate task of being in the Grace Kelly role. Talk about never being able to live up to a high standard.It's not a good movie. Yes, I'm taking it on its own terms and not comparing it to High Noon and, yes, I'm judging it on the level of a made-for-TV effort. It's STILL not a good movie. It takes some lame plot any viewer of old TV westerns has seen before and slaps the name of a classic film on it to try and get people to watch it. I have no idea if they were successful at that in 1980 but I hope not. Since we didn't get High Noon 3: Will Kane Strikes Back, I'll assume the public back then responded with the appropriate amount of scorn this deserves.

Right out of the gate, this movie had an almost impossible hurdle to overcome by invoking the name of "High Noon", so it shouldn't come as any surprise that the result was somewhat disappointing. Had the film makers gone for an entirely different premise, you might have had a reasonably interesting Western. However comparisons with the original were virtually assured by touting the 'Return of Will Kane, and when you throw that challenge at the viewer, you've got to expect to take your lumps.Back in 1952, when Gary Cooper threw his marshal's badge into the dirt in Hadleyville, he was a fifty one year old actor, so I wasn't expecting to see Lee Majors show up a full decade younger. At least Katherine Cannon's portrayal of Mrs. Kane didn't give way to the same reverse aging process as her husband. I really have to wonder why the casting gurus went with this strategy, as it bothered me pretty much throughout the picture.About the only scene that captured my imagination was that saloon showdown when Will Kane first met Ben Irons (David Carradine), and he winds up bluffing the villain and his sidekick Emmett (Charles Benton) into backing down. The picture could have used some more creativity like that, but wound up being a pretty standard Western the rest of the way. Pernell Roberts' turn as sheriff J.D. Ward was fairly successful, having his bases covered as an all around bad guy. I did a quick sit up and take notice when he ordered his black deputy (J.A. Preston) to "Fetch your people" to form a posse, thereby adding racist to the list of his other endearing qualities. The idea that Kane would take up with outlaw Irons to protect him from Marshal Ward was generally handled OK, although more than once I wondered why Irons wouldn't have tried to make his own getaway. Of course everything that happened in the story prefaced the final showdown between Kane and Ward, with the point of Ward's mastery of long range sharp shooting about to be tested. The serving of the warrant gimmick was one of the more effective endings to a final gun battle that I've seen, so you can score another plus for the picture there. But once again, without the clock, without the train tracks and with no mounting tension to speak of, this poor man's version of "High Noon" simply failed to satisfy. And if I didn't hear it with my own ears, I wouldn't have believed that the final score would go spaghetti.

I hated this movie when I watched it, and after watching it again now I know why I hate it so much.High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane had virtually nothing to do with the original High Noon. It cashed in in the original to give us a title character and that was about all. Near the beginning we get a gratuitous slaughter of a pen full of horses as the bounty hunter tries to catch a guy he knows could not have committed the crime he's charged with. Since the guy is in with the horses, just shoot the horses to find the guy, right? I wasn't angry with the guy who shot the horses, I was angry that the writer and producer thought that disgusting and unnecessary scene would be worth including in the movie. I don't care that they of course didn't REALLY shoot the horses, it was still gratuitously sick. It didn't make me hate the bad guy (which he earned on his own), it made me hate the movie. And, it never got any better afterward.Lee Majors as Will Kane was horrible. Talk about a stiff, cardboard, unsympathetic portrayal. Pernell Roberts came across as the biggest jerk on the planet. Sure, you're not supposed to like the 'bad guy' but in this case it went beyond 'dislike' to 'I despise this movie because the bad guy is so annoying.' (Actually, Richard Jaeckel, Skip Homeier and Richard Boone played numerous bad guys who I still enjoyed watching even though I wanted them to 'get theirs'.) I don't know how Majors or Roberts has ever been a success in acting; neither of them can play a character I care one iota about. I think though that I could tolerate Majors and Roberts and the storyline a lot better if there wasn't this tenuous attempt to connect this story with High Noon. It could have stood on its own as a story and in my opinion would have been much better had it been a story in its own right than with the attempted High Noon tie-in. Lee Majors compared to Gary Cooper is like Tom Selleck compared to Clark Gable. This movie's biggest annoyance is that they tried to cash in on the name of a classic Western, for no good reason. Now, if we saw a much older Will Kane having to face the sons of the men he had to kill, that would be a relevant story to make a Part II; this however is ruined by trying to make the connection. I'm changing my '1' rating to a '4', but really this was a very misguided effort.

HIGH NOON PT. 2 (BRING ON THE DISAPPOINTMENT) There really isn't an adequate way to describe how terrible this movie was. I believe in a fair system of evaluating movies: that they have certain goals in mind and try their very hardest to achieve them. The single goal of this movie was to point out events that happened in the plot line of the original High Noon through stale and unbelievable situations, as much as possible, as to conceal its completely lack of meaningful dialog or purpose in general. As a standalone movie, it failed to have any semblance of an interesting plot. As a sequel, it completely rejected the motivations of the characters in the original movie, reducing the cinematic experience to, "suffer through the terrible dialog for 5 minutes until a gunfight occurs". If only a few words or a single phrase could convey how completely vacuous this movie is, then this review would definitely be paragraphs shorter and most likely contain a few expletives.Will Kane (the fake one, Lee Majors) comes back to Hadleyville with his not-as-hot-as-Grace-Kelley bride Amy Kane (Katherine Cannon) with the intent of setting up a small cattle farm, with some horses here, and some cows and bulls there. Lacking any explained or implied purpose or intent, three villains decide to come to town in a fashion that is strangely plagiarized (and far better executed) by the original High Noon. Ben Irons (David Carradine), the main outlaw, is hunted down by the new Marshal of the town (Michael Pataki) and his posse, setting in motion a not-so-epic struggle that could have easily been resolved by never making this film in the first place. In a strange twist of foundational beliefs, Kane decides to wield a gun whenever possible and shoot people to the tunes of the awfully compiled soundtrack. Jerry Jameson, the director, should have taken a second of his time to realize that he should have opted out of butchering the sequel to such a great movie and quit his dead-end job at the prestigious USA Film studios, if not only to spare his future audiences from torture that could possibly be used to extract valuable information from the inmates at Guantanamo bay. "Tell us the truth or you will be forced to watch this movie!" Usually movies rely on nuanced cinematography and great acting to create an interesting story that an audience would actually surrender some of their valuable time to watch. Apparently USA Studios went ahead and skipped this chapter in the book entitled "how not to make a bomb of a movie". The only way High Noon Pt. 2 could produce drama was by putting some poorly written, 80's syn th music on top of the action. You know, the kind of music that makes you want to vomit and throw away that old Casio you have been storing in your closet for decades. Apparently mentioning important events in the previous High Noon was not enough to make this movie interesting, and dramatic "DUN DUN DUNS" and "SHREEK SHREEKS" needed to be added to jar the audience into submission. "Oh no, please don't do this to me," I kept screaming as the fake Kane plunged into dialog about "how he needed to get back at the new marshal." My efforts to somehow use my shrieking voice to alter the soundtrack on the magnetic VHS tape were in vain, and I nearly suffered a few mortal wounds. Fortunately, I was able to return the movie to the Hollywood video drop-off box two hours after viewing it, saying my last "thank you" to the legacy of High Noon sell-out movies that need to be quickly forgotten. If you want more heartaches, try the 80's remake of the original High Noon. I swear, the purple pill isn't going to save you this time.Most of this review has contained ambiguous bad-mouthing that does not confront the terrible reality of the movie itself. I'll fix that in the flick of a wand! Remember the original High Noon, where Will Kane was a reluctant hero who did the right thing and fought Miller to the death? Say goodbye. Kane takes part in a series of events that run contrary to his "no violence unless absolutely necessary" beliefs, shifting the movie from an allegory about political persecution into a poorly executed Western that completely relies on gunfighting to entertain the audience. Kane fights the new Marshal a number of times, shooting back and forth, never getting hit, utilizing almost every bankrupt Western movie convention known to humanity. Instead of leaving you with the message that you need to stand up for yourself when outside pressures become overwhelming, this film lets you know that violence is always the answer, even when it comes to deciding whether someone is innocent or not. Why ask questions if you can just shoot people? High Noon pt. 2 failed to live up to its own standards, and was so incredibly bad and unwatchable that it descended beyond the point of being "so bad that its actually funny" to become "two hours of pain that will not be easily forgotten". The specifics of the plot are not even worthy of discussion, because at best they were completely ripped from the original film, or taken straight from the journal of a screenwriter who has the same ability to tell stories as a veteran who can't get over a war. "One day, back in 'Nam" becomes "One day, back in High Noon the original". Please, do not see this film. If you happen to start a class action lawsuit against USA Studios for releasing it, please notify me so I can sign up my name along with as many fake names as I can possibly think of.