KIDS ON FILM : ‘Tombstone’...

The prologue to this movie tells us we are about to see “the earliest example of organized crime in America.” But the violence much more resembles modern-day street gangs--Bloods and Crips in spurs. Massacres inspired by personal slights. Drug-related shootings (in this case, opium). Even gang members targeted by their attire (in this case, red scarves for the cowboys).

No wonder kids who weren’t raised on Westerns and don’t much care for the ones they’ve seen on TV responded to this one. The Old West never seemed so familiar.

“I thought it was great,” said Jeffrey Djernaes, 5.

“I thought it was really great,” said his friend Austin Blount, 7.

“It was exciting,” said Lauren Kampff, 10.

One hopes that this blood-soaked movie was not meant for children, although it seemed to draw more than the number usually found in R-rated movies. Some came with adults, some without.

Austin said some parts made him sad, particularly the opening, when an entire wedding party is massacred and “when some of the good guys got killed.”

Holly Robison, 13, said she normally doesn’t mind seeing shooting as long as people are just shot and fall down.

“I don’t like to see them suffer,” she said. “This was too bloody.”

In this reincarnation, Tombstone is a sort of sin city, with 24-hour gambling, drinking and opium. Earp’s wife loses herself in laudanum, while Holliday is on the verge of death from his excesses throughout the movie.

In these films, the hero may kill people. But he feels really bad about it. In this one, Earp kills countless more cowboys than the three the encyclopedia credits him with. But as a thoroughly 1990s antihero, he cries and asks a lot of philosophical questions.

He receives some pop psych and pop poetic answers. Some of these musings might be accessible to kids. But when Earp goes on a bloody rampage after his brother is killed, Holliday’s explanation (“Make no mistake, it’s not revenge he’s after. It’s a reckoning.”) escaped me, as well as the kids.

Younger children who can’t help but see stories and characters in black and white were clear on who was good and who was bad.

“The good guys won,” Austin declared. “They killed all the bad guys.”

For most, it seemed to be the action that kept their interest for a quick-moving two hours and 15 minutes.

Some kids said they appreciated the acting, particularly Kurt Russell as Earp and Val Kilmer as Holliday. “All of them were good,” said Marie Mallat, 12.

Whatever kept their interest, it wasn’t the love story between Earp and the actress--a romance-novel kind of chemistry between a strong independent woman and a tall, dark, semi-articulate stranger.

“What love story?” Austin asked.

“Love story,” Marie mused. “Was that another movie?”