Western showdown
Costner a cattle rancher battling foes in soapy ‘Yellowstone’
Who wants to tell Kevin Costner he’s starring in a remake of “Dal- las”?
In the Academy Awardwinner’s (“Dances with Wolves”) first ongoing prime-time series, he plays John Dutton, the owner of the largest cattle ranch in all of these great United States. We are told it is about the size of Rhode Island.
It’s not easy being No. 1. This Montana cowboy finds himself fending off greedy business developers, rapacious Indians and his own squabbling children.
John takes no guff from anyone and will move heaven and earth — or just a river, as he does here — to foil his foes. John is a reworked version of Jock Ewing, mean as dirt and with a memory that runs deeper than the Grand Canyon for any slights.
There are larger-than-life characters and then there are impossible-to-believe roles, and “Yellowstone” runs deep with the latter. We’re only halfway through the year, and Kelly Reilly (“True Detective”) gets my nomination for Worst Performance in the Worst Written Part in a drama.
As John’s only daughter, Beth, she’s a shark in the boardroom and a loon everywhere else. She’s prone to rages, drinking herself blotto and bathing outside in a trough. Shades of “Dallas” ’ Lucy and Ray, she hooks up with the ranch manager and later flirts with a married man. “Where’s the fun of breaking a single man? When I break you, I want to know that I’m breaking generations,” she says.
Creator Taylor Sheridan writes her as if everything he learned about women came from “Basic Instinct.”
Ornery widower John also has three sons. He loathes Jamie (Wes Bentley, “American Horror Story”) for not being the man he wanted and becoming — — a lawyer, one who nonetheless toils against the developers lusting after the land. When he tells Jamie he has his mother’s hands, he’s so not complimenting him. Lee (Dave Annable, “Brothers & Sisters”) works the ranch and might as well be another hired hand. The youngest son, Kayce (Luke Grimes, “True Blood”), is the one who got away, became a decorated Army soldier and now lives on a nearby reservation with his Indian wife and their young son.
Kayce is something of a horse whisperer, and as the first four hours that Paramount Network made available show, finds himself running across a large number of people who need to be shot for all sorts of justifiable reasons. At times, it’s like watching Marvel’s “The Punisher Out West.”
“In case you don’t already know, there’s no such thing as heaven,” Kayce says before dispatching one victim.
As the body count grows, you can imagine Kayce pulling the trigger on someone who didn’t have exact change for the laundromat. Never has a character been so ripe for parody.
As the star and the sun of this universe, Costner brings all the wrong acting tricks to “Yellowstone,” often seeming like a graduate of the David Caruso School of Posing and Wearing Sunglasses.
Paramount Network’s first ongoing drama also volleys a surprising number of f-bombs for a basic cable show, but we don’t have to be that vulgar. There’s a much easier way of summing up “Yellowstone”: Horsepucky.