Angry Movie Lurker Review 30: True Grit (3 STARS)

Following the murder of her father by hired hand Tom Chaney, 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross sets out to capture the killer. To aid her, she hires the toughest U.S. marshal she can find, a man with "true grit," Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn. Mattie insists on accompanying Cogburn, whose drinking, sloth, and generally reprobate character do not augment her faith in him. Against his wishes, she joins him in his trek into the Indian Nations in search of Chaney. They are joined by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who wants Chaney for his own purposes. The unlikely trio find danger and surprises on the journey, and each has his or her "grit" tested.

The original 1969 version was on TV a few months ago and because there was nothing else on I watched it yet again for the double digit time and still enjoyed it. I got to see the new one recently with Jeff Bridges and had read that this version was closer to the book (having never read the book I don't know) but it is slighty different to the original but mostly in dialogue (language relevant to the time) as there seems to me to be a lot more of it and in some of the set pieces that are set at different times and with less or more participants, there are different engagements and meetings but other than that you get more or less the same as the original except this movie is grittier and slighty darker (pardon the pun), Jeff Bridges (Cogburn) is excellent and so is everybody else's performance Hailee Steinfeld (Mattie) and Matt Damon (LaBoeuf), the other difference is the ending it shows something the original didn't and I could have done without it, I liked how the original ended at a certain moment and left it at that but that's just my opinion.

If they were both on on a wet saturday afternoon at the same time I would choose the original because I grew up with Wayne and sometimes remakes are unneccesary but it's definitely worth a watch.