Best movie of this year hands down!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

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

Desolation Canyon is a western that takes some of the themes from the John Wayne classic Big Jake and develops them a bit further. In fact it's quite the family tangle for Stacy Keach who essentially plays the Duke character and admirably fills his boots.Some outlaws come to the town where Patrick Duffy is the sheriff and his old partner Stacy Keach lives in retirement and raising his two grandkids. The outlaws include his son who is the father of the grand children and on the way out of town grab the boy Drake Johnston. The boy's mother Kelly Overton is divorced from the son Victor Browne and she's keeping company with David Rees Snell the town banker who is nearly killed in the robbery. He's an Easterner and insists accompanying Duffy and Keach. In fact when the final showdown comes it's almost a relief because for what should be a straightforward story, the plot has an incredible amount of twists and turns. There are a couple of bounty hunters also on the trail with their own agenda, the outlaws have one aside from the robbery, it's all a bit hard to follow.Still the players do very well in an extremely and needlessly convoluted story.

After seeing Robert Duvall in "Broken Trail," I guess nothing much can compare to that. "Desolation Canyon" was awful. First of all, where did they get the name? One hour Republic Studios films used to have titles like that that bore no relation whatsoever to the movie. This was a one hour Roy Rogers movie that was dragged out to two unbelievable hours, but didn't even have the comic relief of Gabby Hayes. Everybody in the movie was Canadian except for the leads. I'm fed up with that. The only highlight for me was Patrick Duffy. No, not his acting. I saw an amazing resemblance to Hopalong Cassidy. I'm going to write a screenplay for a bio-pic of William Boyd and try to sell it to Duffy. Who can we cast in Andy Clyde's old part?

This was a very nice story but felt the flow of the movie and some of the acting were weak.It was nice to see a western that instilled basic family values and had a heartwarming plot. I did like the acting of the outlaw son, the little boy and his mother.The written story and concept was excellent and I look forward to seeing more stories of this type.The movie so-so, the bounty hunter plot was somewhat confusing. There was also confusing moments when outlaws, bounty hunters and rescue team were face to face, but then all walked away to meet at a later time. The flow was just not good in those sections.Stacy Keach did not seem to be dynamic enough in this role.The outlaws did a great job.

4 stars out of 10 Everyone's heard of the "chick" flick, but nobody ever says anything about flicks that would be of no interest except to guys. That's what this film is - it is the exact opposite of the chick flick - a word that I probably can't use here, so you can fill in the blank.This thinly plotted, prodding western could have all been told in a half hour program, with commercials.I had actually looked forward to this, having seen the previews, and also due to the fact it was being shown on the Hallmark Channel - which up until now I had always equated with quality films.The story, such as it was, revolved mainly around two ancient, grizzled old-timers, Swede (Patrick Duffy) and Samuel (Stacy Keach.) Samuel's estranged adult son, Johnny and his gang rob the bank, and Swede as the Sheriff and Samuel as a former bounty hunter, along with Edwin, a banker previously from Boston, go slowly ambling after them. Swede (and why he's called that is anybody's guess, since he obviously is Irish and not Swedish), and his old friend, Samuel, neither one seem to be in any hurry to catch up to the bank robbers. Swede is so reluctant, I could only wonder why he kept running for the office of Sheriff, since he obviously didn't care for the job.In addition to robbing the bank, Johnny stops by the home of his estranged wife, Olivia, and picks up his son, Abe, a kid around six years old. Yeah, I know that's what I'd do if I were on the run--take a six old along with me.Johnny and Olivia also have a daughter, maybe a year or two older, named Molly, but Johnny doesn't make much effort to snag her.Samuel's Mexican wife, who is young enough to be his daughter, comes and stays with Olivia and Molly during this time. Like everything else in this film, this comes to nothing in particular, beyond her telling Olivia about her own young son's tragic tale.At one point, Swede, Samuel and Edwin arrive at a tavern in an area considered so rough Swede takes off his badge before going in. There they encounter one of the bank robbers but Swede, as Sheriff, does nothing about it, neither does anybody else. There's some words exchanged, trouble started by the bank robber, but it doesn't come to anything much.At another point in the film, young Abe decides to run off during a shoot-out between the bank robbers and the trio who have been slowly following them. Now the intelligent thing to do would have been for the kid to run in the direction of his grandpa Samuel, (or hide) but no, he doesn't do either--instead he goes fogging across the prairie through grass higher than his head, no doubt getting a mess of ticks in the process.There is some very boring dialog between Swede and Samuel, with Edwin as the outsider.There is some more boring dialog between two bounty hunters who are trailing along behind Swede, Samuel and Edwin -- these two consist of a mountain man and a philosophical Mexican.There is some shooting, with the bad guys being the usual very bad shots, and with the so-called good guys walking into ambushes and gimping across a wide street in plain sight but with only one of them taking a non-fatal bullet in the leg.This film was only two hours (with commercials making it less actually), but it seemed like two weeks.