In LONE RIDER, I was hoping for another A GUNFIGHTER'S PLEDGE. That is to say, a made-for-TV yarn with a name actor in the lead and all the trappings of a good old-fashioned, gunslinging tale of the Old West. What I got here was utter boredom, including the big shootout near the end. Lou D. Phillips returns from the war to the family homestead, only to discover an old friend (Vincent Spano) is buying up everybody's property and running them off. The plot as such is the same as A GUNFIGHTER'S PLEDGE, which saw Luke Perry as a former sheriff defending a widow's ranch against a land-grabbing evildoer (played by a black-clad, mustache-twirling C. Thomas Howell). We run into immediate problems in LONE RIDER: as much as I like Phillips, he doesn't ring true as a soldier-turned-civilian in the Old West. He's too clean-shaven and nicely groomed. Also, Spano acts like he's reading his script for the first time, and is unconvincing as an old friend-turned-enemy. Likewise, Stacy Keach playing Phillips' dad reads his lines (trite as they may be) so flatly, you have to believe he knew what a turkey he got himself into here. The two females leads are generic and forgettable. Also, no matter what Spano does, including beating up Phillips' cousin and later killing his dad, Phillips just sort of sits around, doing nothing -- until the very end, at least, when there is a badly staged and photographed gunfight. Luke Perry, who did feel like a real cowboy in his TV movie, would have made the bad guys pay dearly a lot sooner and a lot swifter. I have a feeling this may have been shot in Canada, which is always a mistake. Everything seems to be moving under water, which is typical of Canadian-lensed TV movies.