Plot
The Lady (Sharon Stone) enters the Old West town of Redemption circa 1881. In an attempt to seek vengeance for her father's death, she enters a single elimination gunfighting contest held by Redemption's ruthless leader, John Herod (Gene Hackman). and is introduced to Cort (Russell Crowe), a former Herod henchman turned reverend, whom Herod forced to enter the contest.
The winner of the contest will receive $123,000 in cash "courtesy of Wells Fargo", the implication being that the money was stolen from Wells Fargo, since the cash is still in the sort of strongbox used to transport valuables on stagecoaches. The Lady forges a platonic friendship with Fee "The Kid" Herod (Leonardo DiCaprio), an arrogant and young gunslinger plus gun shop owner who hopes to impress Herod, whom he believes to be his father, although Herod denies the claim. As Cort is persecuted for abandoning his violent past in favor of a peaceful religious life, the first and second rounds of the competition ensue and he slowly begins to win the respect of the townspeople. Both Lady and Cort find that Herod's main goal of the contest is to eliminate anyone who might pose a threat to him as leader of the town, and form a bond over their histories with Herod.
Haunted by her childhood traumas, Lady reflects that as a young girl, Herod manipulated her into killing her father (Gary Sinise), the town's former Marshal. With Lady, Cort, Herod and The Kid left as the four remaining contestants, Kid challenges Herod to a duel to win his respect. Although they both injure each other with bullet wounds, Kid's wounds prove fatal and he dies in the Lady's arms. Herod, though obviously saddened by the Kid's death, still refuses to acknowledge the young man as his son, believing him to be the result of his wife's affair with a farmer. When Lady and Cort are forced to face each other, they devise a plan to kill Herod and free Redemption from his oppression. The Lady fakes her death with help from the town's local doctor (Roberts Blossom) and makes her return known seconds before Cort and Herod's duel by using the Kid's dynamite to blow up Herod's illegitimate business establishments. In the confusion, Cort dispatches Herod's men while the Lady goes on to fight Herod. They draw their guns, but Herod outdraws and shoots Lady in the chest, but she shoots him in the chest in a more fatal area and finishes him with a well-aimed gunshot to the eye. With Herod gone and the law restored, Cort becomes the new Marshal of the town as Lady rides off into the sunset.
Read more about this topic: The Quick And The Dead (1995 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)