Disney's `Tombstone': It's Holliday's Show

------------ MOVIE REVIEW ------------ XX 1/2 "Tombstone," with Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehn, Powers Boothe, Bill Paxton, Dana Delany, Sam Elliott. Directed by George P. Cosmatos, from a script by Kevin Jarre. Aurora, Broadway Market, Crossroads, Everett Mall, Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Kirkland Parkplace, Renton Village, Seatac Mall, Varsity. "R" - Restricted because of violence, sexual situations. -------------------------------

Wyatt Earp movies almost always end up being about his tubercular sidekick, the colorfully self-destructive gambler, Doc Holliday.

You wonder why Earp's straight-man role attracts anyone, yet Kevin Costner will play the Arizona lawman in next year's Lawrence Kasdan Western bearing Earp's name. Kurt Russell has also chosen to play him in this slow, pretty Disney Western - thus handing the movie over to Val Kilmer.

Holliday is the showiest, best-written part Kilmer's had since he played Jim Morrison, and he runs with it. It helps that the script by Kevin Jarre (who wrote "Glory") gives him all the best lines, but Kilmer adds plenty of drawling, impudent nuance.

One conversation about Earp's newfound marital bliss, during which Earp prattles on about fidelity and growing up (we already know his wife is a hopeless opium addict), ends with what seems like congratulations from his best friend. Yet when Holliday tells Earp, "You're an oak," Kilmer makes it sound like he means "You're an oaf."

Whether he's trying to deal with his lustful girlfriend ("You're either a good woman, or the anti-Christ") or drunkenly defending his honor ("I've not yet begun to defile myself") or allowing that he's probably seeing double but that's OK because he's got "one gun for each of you," Kilmer generates nothing but smiles. By the end of the movie, Kilmer can even get a laugh out of saying "Hello, Wyatt." He's the most charming drunk since Elwood P. Dowd.

It's too bad Holliday never hooks up with Earp's naughty actress girlfriend (Dana Delany), whose idea of heaven is room service. Delany has a Mae West way with lines like "I tried to be good, but it's just so boring." Paradoxically, there are suggestions that her character, an actor friend (Billy Zane) and a gay fan (Jason Priestley) may have been intended as the moral center of the story, but that idea gets lost the second Priestley disappears.

Unfortunately, director George P. Cosmatos ("Rambo," "Cobra"), who took over when Jarre was fired as director, emphasizes action over character. The opening massacre is a meaningless lift from "The Magnificent Seven," and all the shoot-em-ups after the OK Corral battle seem redundant. When Charlton Heston is dragged in to beef up these final scenes, the restless audience spends more time trying to identify the actor ("Why, why . . . it's Moses") than place his function in the plot.

While you're watching "Tombstone," you may find yourself thinking back to other Doc Hollidays. Certainly there's not much else to occupy the mind.

Victor Mature played him as a Shakespeare-quoting angel of death in "My Darling Clementine." Kirk Douglas saw him as an obsessed alcoholic in "Gunfight at the OK Corral." Stacy Keach suggested he was on death's door during the OK Corral battle in the revisionist "Doc." Jason Robards found him ultimately more moral than the vengeful Earp in "Hour of the Gun."

If "Tombstone" had been a better movie, Kilmer and Jarre's interpretation of Holliday as a gallant, loyal, consumptive wit might well have been definitive.