Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Why bother with a personal introduction when I can get right to the point? I'll only say that I watched it from a bootleg video I bought from from a vendor and threw it away after a week. How clueless was director James Miner when he chose to direct this bootleg debacle?

Plot: Lincoln Dunnison (James Van Der Beek) and George Durham(Ashton Kutcher) are upstarts in a new group of lawmen named Texas Rangers. The time is sometime after the Civil war, presumably during the late 1860's or early 1870's. Both of them join with Captain Leander McNelly (Dylan McDermott) who's been chosen to head the new police force, which is assigned to bring law and order to the Nueces, Texas area. Some black dude named Randolph Douglas (Usher Raymond) has also joined the Rangers, who quicky grow to about 30 men.

Both Dunnison and Durham are competing for a love interest, a prairie girl named Caroline Dukes (Rachael Leigh Cook) whose father is besieged by an outlaw named John King Fisher (Alfred Molina) who has allegedly rampaged whole towns. In one scene he and his men are seen rounding up virtually every villager and massacring them in cold blood. He has committed other massacres in the past; his victims include relatives of Dunnison and Durham. In their mission to take out Fisher, the Rangers also come upon some unnamed Latina babe played by Leonor Varela, who leads them to the location of Fisher and his men. Then comes the usual shoot-em-ups, the cliched one-liners, and the usual final showdown south of the Rio Grande.

Here's the wonderful list of cannonball-sized plot holes, mistakes, cliches, inconsistencies, and such. I'll only name a few, since the movie's flaws make up a long list:

1. Wrong Location: The filming took place in CANADA (?), which is as cold as it gets. And the story supposedly took place in the deserts of Southern Texas, near the Rio Grande. And the villain had Spanish-speaking henchmen and a Latina babe for Goodness Sakes! Shouldn't it have been filmed in MEXICO instead?

2. PC trash: There would have been no Black Ranger (this one's played by an out-of-place Usher Raymond) even after the Civil War. Racism, especially towards former slaves by defeated Confederate veterans, was still prevalent after the Civil War, and let's not forget that Texas was once a slave state that sent troops to fight for the Confederacy.

3. Plot hole: Dylan McDermott seems to be pretty healthy, even though his character supposedly has advanced TB. At one point he even screams out clearly "You keep shooting till you taste an outlaw's blood!" as he leads men into battle. I almost laughed when I saw him in his deathbed speaking clearly and eloquently except for an occasional cough. Wouldn't he be coughing out blood and his voice be raspy and exhaustive by now?

4. Historical error: The dynamite wihich the villain played by Alfred Molina used against the Rangers in one scene wasn't invented until 1898 by Alfred Nobel, who was barely past his teen years in the early 1870's.

5. The overall acting: It's is weak at best. Usher Raymond complains too much like a brat, Van Der Beek acts too much like he's a romantic lover (he came straight out of Dawson's Creek after all), Kutcher is in comic-relief mode and also utters too much modern dialogue, McDermott is cardboard here (enough said), Molina is the Western version of Dr Evil (MUAHAHAHAHA!!!), and the others... well, they're still unknowns. But then again, everyone looked wooden and emotionless in every scene of this movie except for the gunfight scenes. Leonor Varela is eye candy at best.

6. Plot hole: The outlaw played by Alfred Molina, as ruthless as he was, would never have destroyed whole towns or exterminated all its inhabitants, even women, as shown in this movie. The US Government would have sent whole armies of soldiers and lawmen to bash any criminal gang who committed these Nazi-like massacres.

7. The weak ending: The Dukes patriarch is taken hostage, he is later traded for Leonor Varela (whom I actually wanted to see hanged or shot if you ask me) and the Rangers trace the captors to Fisher's camp in Mexico, where Dunnison and Fisher lock eyes for the final showdown and... yawn... screw it. You know the rest

8. PC trash: There is no blood spilled during any of these shootouts (after all the movie is PG-13). "Shhh... we're supposed to be PC for everyone, especially bleeding-heart liberals." Enough said.

I have to stop here, otherwise this section of the review would be far too long.

With wonderful plot holes such as this, it's no wonder that Texas Rangers wasn't released by Miramax until at least two years after its original schedule. Everything about this flick is wrong. Even the timing of its release was wrong: It came out in November 2001, just as the War in Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban was in full swing. At least that war was full of power, intensity, and action, courtesy of guided missiles, cluster bombs, and US Marines equipped with infared cameras, which is something this flick lacks utterly.

In all, Texas Rangers stands as a testament to why no movie should become overreliant on cliches, why historical fact is important, and teen TV actors simply do not belong in action films, especially if their range and talents are limited. As this review is being read the movie's sitting at your bargain video store or bootleg vendor's stand... and will probably remain there for eternity, having tarnished everyone involved.

Tragically, the ultimate loser in this debacle is Rachael Leigh Cook, who had already appeared in two other flops, AntiTrust and Josie and the Pussycats, the other box office flop movies of 2001 I won't be seeing. Her lines here are weak and cliched, her character is completely unnecessary as a love interest (especially with Lenora Varela on board) and it's a wonder how any guy of the 19th Century would be interested in a frail girl who's 5'2' and barely 100 pounds. Obviously the script gave her nothing to do, but what she said and how she said it was wooden anyway: at one scene she's standing over a grave of a fallen Ranger and looks up to say, "I can't help but think they're watching." Come on!

It's a very sad and terrible fall from grace for an enchanting fairy princess who charmed and endeared movie audiences as the geek turned hottie in She's All That. She simply didn't deserve to be in trash-fests like Get Carter and Blow Dry plus the other debacles previously mentioned. Her weak track record may have been one reason why Freddie Prinze Jr. chose to hook up with Sarah Michelle Gellar instead of her. I haven't seen Cook in any feature film, much less any flick made by a well-known Hollywood studio, since then.

I last heard that she was filming in a soon-to-be viewed TV series about an ambitious young female FBI Agent who fears nothing and no one. Considering the high mortality rate for new shows aimed towards young people (a lot of them are every bit as wooden, cliched, and poorly scripted as this film), it's a question whether this show can last one season, much less two. While I'm not a fan of teen shows, I wish her good luck. She really deserved a lot better than this filth.

Recommended: No