Tombstone (1993) is thirty-three years old, R-rated, and apparently the rare nineties western that's stayed alive the old-fashioned way, through pure word-of-mouth quotability, no memes or GIFs required (okay, except Curly Bill's "Well... bye."). That's Steve's pick, and it's personal. He fell for it as a teenager, rewatched it a couple times a year for most of his adult life, personally converted a few college friends into believers, and married into a household where his wife is every bit as obsessed (she made a childhood pilgrimage to the actual town of Tombstone, Arizona). Nic, somehow, had never seen it, despite owning half the dialogue secondhand through an early-2000s rap verse that turned out to be wall-to-wall Tombstone quotes. Twenty years of bobbing his head along to "smoke wagon" finally paid off. What follows is a tour through one of the most stacked casts either dad has encountered on this show, and a healthy chunk of the runtime is just pointing at the screen going "wait, that's also..." Kurt Russell gets credit for what Steve declares the single greatest mustache in cinema history, right before Wyatt Earp introduces himself by stealing a man's chair, his ego, and a quarter stake in the local casino, all in one scene. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday turns into the unofficial MVP of the episode, one-liner after one-liner, including the dads' shared appreciation for "I've got a gun for the both of you" as a legitimately sound tactical philosophy. They debate breaking out the "missing or artificial limb" tag for the first time in a while over Virgil's ruined arm, and Nic spends a solid stretch lobbying for Powers Boothe to become a hereditary title, like the Dalai Lama, but with a better mustache. Underneath the body count, though, both dads keep circling back to the quiet, weirdly tender friendship at the center of it, the kind neither expected from a movie this violent. Steve calls it a top-five all-timer. Nic, a lifelong westerns skeptic, leaves a convert.
