I was a big fan of the Deadwood series but it was cancelled after three seasons without reaching any kind of resolution. This movie was made to finally give it a proper ending but it comes very, very late, and the various performers have all aged out of their roles. In fact, a few of them died in the nearly 15 intervening years. Unfortunately while the intent to finally provide closure to fans is laudable, this is simply not a good film and basically amounts to a rehash of the final season.

Some ten years later South Dakota is becoming a state and the telephone arrives in Deadwood. Many familiar faces return including George Hearst who is now a US senator and wants to buy land belonging to Charlie Utter to run telephone lines across them. His arrival prompts the heavily pregnant Trixie to insult him from a balcony causing Hearst to realize that he was duped by her faked death all those years ago. After Utter tells Hearst that he won’t be selling his land, he turns up dead and everyone understands that Hearst is up to his old underhanded tactics. Marshal Seth Bullock of course leads the effort to bring him to justice. Meanwhile Al Swearengen is dying of liver failure and his ability to protect Trixie from Hearst’s reprisal is limited. The widow Alma Ellsworth returns as well and uses her money to bid against Hearst to prevent him from acquiring Utter’s land from his estate sale.

Even with lowered expectations, this is a particularly disappointing film due to the childish simplicity of the main plot. Everyone comes back together just to fight one more time against George Hearst who does exactly the same thing that he did in the final season. Despite the fact that Deadwood is now supposed to be a more lawful place and how Hearst is now more powerful and richer than ever, he still resorts to crude, thuggish tactics. Fortunately for the residents of Deadwood, he seems to have come back without his army of hired guns, making it a simple matter for Bullock to outgun him. Hearst’s one attempt to invoke the law to work for him by bringing in marshals from neighboring towns to arrest Trixie is trivially dismissed with a word from Bullock. With this, we finally get to have a more or less happy ending for our beloved characters even though it feels completely silly and doesn’t at all match the tone of the television series when it ran.

In other films of this type, you’d at least expect decent action scenes and some nice looking scenery but it doesn’t even offer that. Probably due to a limited budget, it’s shot entirely on the set that stands in as the town and thus feels constricted. Similarly the advancing age of the actors limits how exciting the action can get. It is especially disappointing that Ian McShane’s Swearengen gets to do nothing at all except ail in bed as he slowly dies. All in all, this is a bad movie but I’d still expect fans of the original series to want to watch it because what else is there?