



NEW YORK -- Colin Farrell is using the myth of the old West for target practice.

In American Outlaws, the actor, whom Hollywood is plugging as the next big scene-stealer, plays Jesse James, the legendary bank robber who ran away with the American imagination. Based on his research for the role, he proceeds to shoot down some of the movies' fanciful notions about the West.

"The West wasn't really all that fun," says Farrell, lolling around his SoHo hotel room in jeans and a peroxide-blond skinhead 'do achieved during a fit of boredom and with a bottle of bleach.

"The clothes were much duller." Pop!

"The people were much meaner." Pow!

"A lot of them were cold-blooded killers." Blam!

"And whether Jesse James really gave back to his own people, that whole Robin Hood thing, was probably just folklore. Or more likely just to keep them quiet." Ka-boom!

But in the movie, co-starring Scott Caan and Ali Larter, "We're all just lovely," says Farrell wryly. "They decided to make it a kids' action movie, and we were supposed to play it for laughs."

Audiences have grown used to getting their westerns told with psychological grit and unadulterated violence. In real life, James died "shot in the back while hanging a picture," says Farrell, who always does his homework. In American Outlaws, that doesn't happen.

A 25-year-old, naturally brown-haired, brown-eyed Irish bloke, Farrell brought emotional baggage to the shoot from his last rebel-with-a-cause picture, Joel Schumacher's dark Vietnam War picture Tigerland, which first signaled his star potential to American audiences.

"I had to get away from that whole Tigerland thing of needing to get the truth in everything, no matter what depths you have to go to," he says.

A print campaign for the movie -- "Bad Is Good Again" -- has been running in such magazines as Teen and Seventeen. But Farrell's empathy goes out to a more serious point made in the movie, broad as it may be.

"I understand the romance of the working-class, common man being put down by the early tycoons and capitalists" who built the railroads and boosted industrial sprawl to the fatal detriment of small-time Western landowners like the Jameses and their kin.

He can see that James became in the American mind what revolutionaries like James Connolly and Michael Collins became for the Irish: "They stood up for their own people to fight against those who were doing well at the expense of those they were supposed to be helping.

"And it was just such an interesting time -- it's the reason I loved Jesse James when I was little. It was so lawless."

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