Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Old-fashioned Old West

In many ways, “Appaloosa” is an utterly conventional Western straight from our gauzily romanticized image of an Old West where men were men, guns were loud and women of loose virtue were as plentiful as the buffalo.

See if this sounds familiar: The elders of a small town under siege by a vicious rancher and his gang of goons hire a pair of flinty but morally upright gunslingers to pin on badges and save them and their town from disaster.

But “Appaloosa” is also a classic example of how choosing the right actors can breathe fresh life into familiar material.

It would be hard to imagine actors more suited to this project than Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen, who play gunslingers Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, and Jeremy Irons, who plays rancher Randall Bragg.

Harris, who also directed and co-wrote the script with Robert Knott from a Robert P. Parker novel, knows the film’s bedrock is the friendship between Cole and Hitch (who sports an 8-gauge shotgun — more like a portable cannon — like a fashion accessory).

As such, the film takes some time to establish their bond. The two have ridden together for a dozen years, moving from place to place as lawmen for hire, and have come to trust each other implicitly in word and deed.

Their friendship is sorely tested by the arrival of comely widow Allie French (Renee Zellweger), who first latches on to the surprised but mightily pleased Virgil. He soon admits he’s developing feelings for her — even though he knows that in his and Hitch’s line of work, “feelings getcha killed.”

But it soon becomes clear that Allie is neurotic; she unswervingly gravitates to any alpha male who happens to come within a 6-foot radius of her. How that affects the dynamics among Cole, Hitch and Bragg — alpha males all — forms the heart of the story.

It’s not perfect; the pace slackens in the second hour, and some scenes are out of the Old West Clichés for Dummies Handbook.

After Cole and Hitch toss Bragg in a cell, a posse of Bragg’s thugs shows up demanding his release. Virgil faces them down, telling the ringleader he’ll be the first to die if the bullets fly — a scene that’s almost an exact duplicate of a sequence in Kevin Costner’s “Wyatt Earp” (not to mention several dozen other films).

Another problem, for me, anyway, is Zellweger. She annoys me — seven years since “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and I’m still working through my trauma — but to be fair, her character is meant to be annoying, providing friction between the three male leads.

And her faults are minimized alongside the sublime talents of Harris, Mortensen and Irons, minimalists who know that less can be just as effective as more.

Harris the director shows an equally sure hand with the story’s underlying theme — how pride, ego, love and friendship can get muddled in ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to sort out.

For those willing to savor its measured subtleties, “Appaloosa” qualifies as a thinking movie fan’s Western.