After a brief prologue, the opening sequence of "Unforgiven" is dark and horrifying. In the town of Big Whiskey, a cowboy in a brothel, angered by the prostitute he has been with, calls to his partner to hold her. He then proceeds to cut up her face.

That same night, a brief "trial" follows and the sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), a rigid former gunfighter, imposes his own kind of justice. But the women in the brothel don't think it's enough — so they post a $1,000 reward for anyone who will kill the two men who mutilated their friend.

The film then moves to a Kansas hog farm where William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is having trouble making ends meet. A young punk who calls himself the "Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett) shows up and asks Munny to join him in going after that reward. But Munny, a widower with two children, declines, insisting that it's over, this life he once led as a drunken, psychotic gunman with a reputation for being the meanest in the land.

But, with the woman who married and tamed him having passed on and Munny sorely in need of cash to make a life for his two youngsters, he soon changes his mind. Enlisting the aid of his former partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who is equally reluctant to go back to his old ways, Munny joins the "Kid" as they head toward Big Whiskey.

Meanwhile, Little Bill is shown to be a mean-tempered sadist who rules Big Whiskey with fear. When English Bob (Richard Harris), a bounty hunter who is accompanied by his biographer, W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), arrives, we see Little Bill go berserk. He also takes great delight in deflating English Bob's self-important yarns about his own exploits, which have taken on mythic proportions as written by Beauchamp.

Eventually, when these parallel stories merge, it is with violence, of course. But this violence suggests that the glamour of Old West gunplay is greatly exaggerated.

Clint Eastwood is probably the only filmmaker today who could mount and successfully direct a Western of the magnitude of "Unforgiven." Shot entirely on location with gorgeous vistas and a real sense of the wide open spaces of the untamed American West, this film has a look, a cinematic grandeur that is more often read about in film books than seen on the screen anymore.