Legends of the Fall (1994)

** SPOLERS AHEAD*** I re-watched the 1994 Edward Zwick-directed melodrama "Legends of the Fall" the other day on TV, and despite it being heavily edited and formatted to a square, I had the exact reaction that I did at the theater years back. It's crap.

Circa 1914 in the American West, a father (Anthony Hopkins) and his three grown sons are hearty ol' patriots until the youngest brother (Henry Thomas) brings home a woman (Julia Ormond), an act that spells tragedy in all CAPS as she soon falls for middle mega-stud brother (Brad Pitt), and then settles for the practical and eldest bro (Aiden Quinn). That comes after after Thomas' innocent self is butchered in World War I and Pitt's stud goes off the mental ranch.

That final grisly, err, grizzly, scene still plays as a punch line to a Monty Python sketch. Worse, the quasi-junior-high-Shakespearean dramatics are made more comedic by crap acting from Hopkins, who squints and blabbers like Popeye's grouchy poppa. With God-awful music, slo-mo cinematography and ABC-daytime soap dialogue, "Legends" seems made for the Oxygen channel, which is where I re-watched it. C