General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Texas Rangers (2001 film)

Texas Rangers is a 2001 American Western directed by Steve Miner, in which a band of young recruits reforms the Texas Rangers in post-Civil War Texas under Captain Leander McNelly to fight outlaws along the Mexican border. It stars James Van Der Beek, Dylan McDermott, Ashton Kutcher, Rachael Leigh Cook, Usher Raymond, and Alfred Molina, and it is one of the largest box-office failures relative to budget in modern American film: a $38 million production that earned $623,374 domestically and $140,366 overseas.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Steve Miner; screenplay by Scott Busby and Martin Copeland¹
Source	Based on Taming the Nueces Strip: The Story of McNelly's Rangers by George Durham, as told to Clyde Wantland (Austin, 1962)¹
Budget	$38 million, financed by Miramax's genre division Dimension²
Release	November 30, 2001, wide, in 402 theaters, distributed by Miramax³
Box office	$319,516 opening weekend; $623,374 domestic; $140,366 overseas; $763,740 worldwide³^•⁴
Critical reception	2% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (1 fresh, 49 rotten of 50 reviews); 29% audience score⁵
Rating and runtime	PG-13 (western violence); about 90 minutes (AFI lists 92 minutes)³^•¹

Spoilers

Plot and cast

The story is set in Texas in 1875, ten years after the Civil War has ended. The Governor of Texas asks Leander McNelly (Dylan McDermott) to form a company of Rangers to uphold the law along the Mexican border. With only a few war veterans, most of the recruits are young men with little or no experience with guns or policing crime, and they face an army of renegade outlaws led by John King Fisher (Alfred Molina).⁶^•⁵

James Van Der Beek plays Lincoln Rogers Dunnison and Ashton Kutcher plays George Durham, two recruits who, like McNelly, have lost family members to outlaws; Rachael Leigh Cook plays Caroline Dukes and Leonor Varela plays Perdita as the women the Rangers are sworn to protect. The supporting cast includes Robert Patrick as Sgt. John Armstrong, Usher Raymond as Randolph Douglas Scipio, Tom Skerritt as Richard Dukes, Oded Fehr as Anton Marsale, Jon Abrahams as Berry Smith, Vincent Spano as Ed Simms, and country singer Randy Travis as Frank Bones, with James Coburn as the narrator.³^•⁵

Production and source material

The screenplay writers had purchased the rights to Taming the Nueces Strip (1962), based on the reminiscences of Texas Ranger George Durham about Captain Leander McNelly and the Special Force, a real unit created in 1874 to protect the Nueces Strip border region.⁷ The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum's magazine recorded that Dimension Films planned the film for a 1999 release as a showcase for Dylan McDermott, that the production was to shoot in Calgary, Canada, and that the museum staff sensed a lack of enthusiasm on Dimension's part from the start.⁷

The film was completed in 1999. Dimension originally dated it for an April 2000 wide release, then delayed it more than half a dozen times while it collected dust and interest costs in the Miramax vault for two years; the studio also kept it far from American Outlaws, another Western targeting a similar audience that was being shuffled around the release calendar.² Steve Miner, who had directed Halloween H20 for Dimension in 1998, directed; the producers were Alan Greisman and Frank Price, and the score was composed by Trevor Rabin.¹^•³

Release and box office

Dimension scheduled the film for the post-Thanksgiving frame on November 30, 2001, and released it into 402 theaters with minimal advertising and awareness; the studio did not screen the film for critics.² The opening weekend grossed $319,516, a $795 per-theater average, ranking 19th for the weekend. Attendance fell 70 percent in the second weekend to $95,396, and the theater count was cut to 86 in the third week, when the film was pulled with a final domestic total of $623,374 after a three-week run.³^•²

The opening weekend accounted for 51.3 percent of the total domestic gross, and the film's legs ratio (total domestic gross divided by its biggest weekend) was 1.95. Worldwide gross of $763,740 was about 0.02 times the $38 million production budget; inflation-adjusted to later dollars, the domestic gross equals $1,317,239.³^•⁴ Overseas, the film was sent straight to video in almost every market, with brief theatrical runs in a few countries: Spain (December 6, 2002, $90,705), Australia (May 16, 2002, $16,662), South Africa ($14,884), Taiwan ($8,579), Türkiye ($6,087), and Egypt ($3,449).²^•⁴ In Spain, the ICAA film registry records 28,938 admissions and receipts of 127,991.85 euros for distributor Lauren Film.⁸

Reception

Reviews were overwhelmingly negative. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 2 percent among 50 critics, with an average rating of 3.70 out of 10, and the site's critics consensus calls it "strictly mediocre stuff" as far as westerns go; the audience score is 29 percent from more than 5,000 ratings.⁵ A Metacritic-listed review described the cast of "fresh-faced, telegenic young actors" as giving performances ranging from adequate to awful.⁹

Some critics saw a better film buried in the released cut. Chris Hewitt, reviewing for Knight Ridder Newspapers on the release date, wrote that a movie shelved this long is usually laughable, chintzy, or dreadfully acted, but that Texas Rangers was none of these things; he judged it short and visibly edited down, and argued the biggest problem was marketing, a Western released "at a time when no one goes to Westerns." He gave it a grade of C and noted that the script gives McDermott's and Van Der Beek's characters complex motivations on parallel paths from grief to vengeance to heroism.¹⁰ Variety's Eddie Cockrell wrote that the large cast was uniformly fine with the pulpy dialogue, but that the film showed only brief flashes of what looked like fully realized characterizations jettisoned during production or post.⁵

Home video and later availability

The film reached home video on May 12, 2015, through Lionsgate Home Entertainment, and became available for streaming on October 8, 2016.³^•⁵ Miramax currently lists it for digital purchase on Apple and Amazon.¹¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026