Review in a Hurry: The deadpan wit's as dry as the gunpowder in Ed Harris' new Western, but emotionally Appaloosa shoots blanks.
The Bigger Picture: Is Harris the new Clint Eastwood? Those are mighty big boots to fill, and while Harris has the flinty stare and the menacing growl down, his eye for resonant material isn't there yet. Appaloosa is mostly a boilerplate Western—a lawman-for-hire facing off against a crooked rancher for control of a frontier town—and when it strays from the form, the results are silly at best and off-putting at worst.
Appaloosa hails from a novel by Robert B. Parker, most notable for his private-eye stories, and a lot of the dialogue is clearly his. Parker specializes in tough guys who find artful ways of being blunt, as do Harris and costar Viggo Mortensen, and watching their playful, hair-trigger banter can be delightful.
But when a woman enters the picture—a woefully miscast Renée Zellweger—the film gets a little more misogynistic than can be explained away with a those-were-the-times rationale, and it's then that some of the running gags start to get clumsy and tired as well. Since the ending's about as anticlimactic as they come, the best way to experience Appaloosa is to see the first half, and then get out of Dodge.
The 180—a Second Opinion: Appaloosa does include about the shortest, funniest gunfight in film history. And seriously, Mortensen's contract should stipulate that he must act from horseback in every film he does.