Just as the postmodern teen-slasher boom nearly killed off the non-ironic teen horror movie, the revisionist Western (along with identity politics, Native American pride, and changing cultural appetites) has all but killed off the old-fashioned Western. Shanghai Noon proved there's still a market for comic Westerns, but just about the only other subgenre to survive has been the teen-hunk Western, a theme party of a genre that affords Teen Beat favorites an opportunity to play dress-up in boots, spurs, and 10-gallon hats. Boasting enough TV veterans (James Van Der Beek, Robert Patrick, Ashton Kutcher, Dylan McDermott, Alfred Molina) to stock a revival of The Battle Of The Network Stars, Rangers follows teen-hunk staples like the Young Guns movies in eschewing newfangled ambiguity in favor of unabashed heroism. Directed by veteran hack Steve Miner, who brings to the project the same lack of personality he's brought to genre exercises like Lake Placid, Halloween H20, and Friday The 13th, Part 2, Texas Rangers is finally receiving a limited theatrical release after years spent in richly deserved post-production limbo. Opening with an exposition-heavy pre-title sequence that reeks of post-production tampering, Texas Rangers stars McDermott as a terminally ill former preacher turned cold-blooded lawman who re-convenes the elite Texas Rangers to protect his state against swarthy banditos led by Molina. Both liberated and cursed by his impending death, McDermott assembles a motley gang of misfits, losers, and hotshots to help him in his task, including book-learning Easterner Van Der Beek, 19th-century dumb guy Kutcher, and R&B sensation Usher Raymond. Of course, nobody expects sociological insight from a Western intended for the Clearasil crowd, but Texas Rangers is so unambitious that it borrows its plot arc from plucky-underdog sports films, with McDermott serving as the crusty coach and Van Der Beek as his quick-learning star player. By the time McDermott leads his charges into a climactic shootout lifted heavily and incompetently from The Wild Bunch, Texas Rangers has long since abandoned any pretense of being anything other than a routine oater, a sort of TNN original movie with better production values. Despite frequent predictions of its imminent death, the Western will no doubt endure as long as film itself. Dim exercises in genre regression like Texas Rangers, however, belong squarely in cinema's distant past.