Texas Rangers Information

Texas Rangers is a 2001 United States drama/western film directed by Steve Miner. It is about a group of Texas Rangers set in the post-American Civil War era.

Plot

Ten years after the Civil War has ended, the Governor of Texas asks Leander McNelly (Dylan McDermott) to recommission a company of Rangers to help uphold the law along the Mexican border. Aside from a few seasoned veterans, the recruits are young men who have little or no experience with guns or policing crime. The antagonist of the story is John King Fisher (Alfred Molina) who is stealing cattle from Texas cattle barons like Richard Dukes and Victor Logan and driving them into Mexico, where he sells them to the Mexican army.

After McNelly and his men pursue Fisher for a while, they fall into a trap, where many of the young and ill-trained Rangers are killed. Defeated and low on morale, the men fall back to a ranch house and attempt to set up an ambush for Fisher. After being double crossed by a woman (perhaps unwittingly), the rangers remain one step behind Fisher and his men. Two of the Rangers follow Fisher and his men to the Mexican border, where they wait for the rest of their company. Once the entire Ranger force arrives, they plan their final attack. In a final gun-slinging showdown, the Rangers face off against Fisher and his men that will tip the state of the border country in the direction of either chaos or justice.

Cast

• James Coburn as Narrator
• James Van Der Beek as Lincoln Rogers Dunnison
• Rachael Leigh Cook as Caroline Dukes
• Ashton Kutcher as George Durham
• Dylan McDermott as Leander McNelly
• Usher Raymond as Randolph Douglas Scipio
• Tom Skerritt as Richard Dukes
• Alfred Molina as John King Fisher
• Randy Travis as Frank Bones
• Robert Patrick as Sgt. John Armstrong
• Oded Fehr as Anton Marsale
• Jon Abrahams as Berry Smith
• Leonor Varela as Perdita

Production

The film's source was the book Taming of the Neuces Strip: The Story of McNelly's Rangers by George Durham.

The film is loosely based on the activities of Leander H. McNelly and the Special Force of the Texas Rangers, but it takes considerable liberties with the historical record (McNelly is shown dying of tuberculosis shortly after the climax of the action, when in real life he had retired from the Rangers the year before; John King Fisher was not actually killed by the Rangers, but came to an agreement with them).

While filmed in 1999, it was not released until 2001

Release

Box office

Texas Rangers was a box office bomb, earning only $763,740 on a budget of $38 million.

Reception

Texas Rangers was widely panned by critics, getting a 2% "Rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes and featuring on their worst of the worst list.