Because of its poor reputation, I’ve been avoiding Jonathan Kaplan’s Bad Girls (1994) for a quarter of a century, but now I’ve finally watched it. Admittedly, apart from its four leading ladies Drew Barrymore, Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson and Madeleine Stowe, it really doesn’t have much to offer: a range of stock Western scenes, directed without any verve or originality; a band of bedraggled brigands straight out of a Spaghetti Western, led by CEO James Russo (Fernando Sancho would have done it much better, of course); a few pointless, misguided references to The Wild Bunch; and little more. It’s a meretricious film but not that bad. Kevin Grant sees it as “a kind of Young Guns meets Thelma and Louise” but “too busy mining the seam of western clichés to seize the genre for feminist ends” (p. 17), whereas Lee Broughton writes that B. G. “and Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995) initiated a short cycle of feminist Westerns that featured female characters who were able to challenge patriarchal order without fear of suffering punishment at a narrative level” (p. 178).
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