by: Tyler Deardorff

John Wayne, please don’t haunt me, but Jeff Bridges was better as Rooster Cogburn than you were. Now don’t get me wrong, both are very good, well acted movies but Jeff Bridges is a hilarious badass in this version.

The Coen Brothers, yet again, make another great movie with beautiful cinematography. 14 year old Hailee Steinfeld steals the movie from movie greats, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin. This movie is about Steinfeld’s character hiring Rooster Cogburn to find Josh Brolin, a.k.a. the man that killed her father. Damon is a hilarious Texas Ranger that tags along. He’s much more tolerable than Glenn Campbell was. The action is good and the humor is dryer than the fields the horses trot on (in the movie, that wasn’t a Nebraska reference).

I was quite surprised that this movie followed as closely as it did to the original. Scenes are dead on, the lines are the same and there’s still room for the Coen’s familiar touch. The final “fill your hands, you son of a bitch” is still as great as it was back then, maybe even better. Bridges cemented himself in the Hall of Badass Fame (yes, I made that up) when he shouts those lines. The snake pit part is way more suspenseful here than the original. Either way I definitely recommend it.  Easily an A-.