Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, June 25, 1994                   TAG: 9406280085
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`WYATT EARP' IS A LONG LOOK AT A LEGEND

Costner, who plays the famous frontier lawman, kept using the word ``big'' to described his intended epic. At more than three hours, a better word would have been ``long.'' In fact, it seems much like a longer take on the same material that inspired ``Tombstone'' earlier this year, with Kurt Russell in the same role in basically the same story.

But ``Wyatt Earp'' does not drag, despite its length and despite the fact that Western film fans have seen the same saga literally dozens of times. The various Earp biographies provide many of the instances that have been recycled in so many Western scripts. It is, after all, exciting material, even if it does all boil down to what author Brian Garfield called ``the Bob Steele plot,'' because Steele acted in so many movies in which he sought revenge on the critters who killed members of his family.

Costner and co-scriptwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan made a good try at the epic Costner was seeking. The life and times of Wyatt Earp do reflect sweeping themes, particularly in the early parts of the picture where he tries to run off and join his older brothers who are fighting in the Civil War; when the Earp family pioneers its way West, and when we see the slaughter of the buffalo and the building of the railroad side by side. Still, in the end, it comes down to the Bob Steele plot, which is OK since it was probably events chronicled about Wyatt Earp that inspired many of those plots.

The movie tends to jump around in time at the beginning and the end. It starts with the Earp brothers assembling to march toward that most well-known of all gunfights at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz. (actually on a street leading to the corral, which the movie handles accurately). Then we switch to young Wyatt and follow him to the later years of his life, when suddenly and somewhat inexplicably we switch back to his early lawman days for an incident that is mentioned earlier in the movie but does not have a whole lot to do with the story.

As long as Kasdan was doing these time switches, he might have stretched his storyline just a little more to when Wyatt Earp came to Hollywood and advised filmmakers about movies featuring the likes of William S. Hart and Tom Mix (who were pallbearers at Earp's funeral). What Kasdan did give us was a gritty, realistic look at the Old West through Earp's life and legend.

Wyatt Earp ***

A Warner Bros. release playing at Salem Valley 8 and Valley View 6. 3:10 min.