« Toronto’s Biggest Stars: Obama and Che | Home | Stock Worth Buying: Pharmaceuticals! »
Review: “Appaloosa”
By kyle | September 15, 2008
3:11 TO YUMA
107 minutes/Rated R
Kyle Smith review of “Appaloosa”
2.5 stars out of 4
Last year around this time, I was sitting in “3:10 to Yuma” and thinking: “Wow! This is just like a ’60s Western.”
This information took a moment to sink in.
Then I thought, “Wow! I really hate 60s Westerns!”
Like “3:10 to Yuma,” “Appaloosa” is nicely photographed and manges to pack in plenty of tense shootouts. So why doesn’t it make my spurs jangle?
Ed Harris plays a new marshall in town in 1882 who, together with his loyal deputy (Viggo Mortensen) tells the town elders that he is going to need Draconian new security laws in order to defeat the villain, Bragg, who cold-bloodedly murdered the previous marshall.
My interest was piqued: Was this to be a War on Terror allegory, with the outspoken liberal Harris as a hero who functions as a stand-in for President Bush? That could be interesting. “That’s the law,” says the marshall. “Your law?” he is asked. “Same thing,” he replies.
But the parallel doesn’t go anywhere. The idea of a security clampdown is dropped and the marshall becomes indistinguishable from many another movie lawman.
Memo to neo-Western filmmakers: when you’re looking for an Olde Time whiskey-drinkin’, pistol-wieldin’,’ rootin-tootin’ varmint - the kind of guy who shaves with a piece of broken glass and vows, “You’ll never hang me!” - hire somebody other than Jeremy Irons. What is this - “Bonanza Revisited”?
Irons’ Western accent is so ridiculous that I couldn’t hear most of his lines over my own laughter, but the movie at least moves forward pretty quickly as the Harris and Mortensen characters wrangle with Irons’ Randall Bragg. There are a couple of well-staged shootouts and the film looks gorgeous.
The addition of Allison (Renee Zellweger), a new woman in town, complicates things considerably. It turns out she’ll have a pull that alters the trajectories of all three men. Zellweger’s finest days, alas, are behind her, and her habit of squinting her way through every role grew tiresome about eight movies ago and is now officially annoying. It’s not ludicrous that three hombres would get so hung up on, but only because she’s almost the only woman around.
As is always the case with this kind of Western, I am flummoxed by the rules of the game in the saloons and on the dusty streets. Harris’ character Virgil Cole beats a guy senseless for no reason and shoots a couple of men essentially for indoor urination.
When tangling with the Bragg character, despite many opportunities to shoot the man Cole instead is dragged through a judicial system with so many loopholes it’s like watching “Law & Order.” Is it a modern justice system, or a frontier one? Or do the filmmakers - Harris himself directed, from a script based on a novel by Spenser creator Robert B. Parker - simply change the rules depending on what they need to keep the movie going?
And why - this was the case in “3:10 to Yuma” also–do desperadoes always need to be transported from place to place, only to be ambushed by gangs of miscreants? When the Bragg character is sentenced to hang, why don’t they just take him outside and find a rope and a branch?
Nope, instead they take him on a long, slow train ride. A movie has a problem when everyone in the audience knows what’s going to happen next. You’ll find your mind wandering to your grocery list or what’s for dinner while waiting for the movie to catch up. The pace is fairly lively, though, and the dialogue pungent. I haven’t read the novel “Appaloosa” but the script frequently sounds like vintage Parker. On “Miss French,” Cole says, “She might become exclusively interestin’.” On catching Bragg, the view is, “Right now, there’s somethin’ runnin’ and we’re tryin’ to catch it.”
Perhaps the best element is the simplest one: The easy camaraderie between Harris and Mortensen, who hatched the idea of doing this film when they worked on “A History of Violence.” They relax and settle into their stirrups as if they were born there.
Topics: Movies |
September 15th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
@ Kyle Which 60s westerns don’t you like? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? The Professionals? The Magnificent Seven? Once Upon a Time in the West? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? True Grit? The Wild Bunch? High Plains Drifter?
If you don’t like westerns that good, you don’t like westerns, period.
September 15th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
OK, I won’t see it. Do you have a review of “The Women”? I’m wondering if Meg Ryan’s appearance would be too distracting for me.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
@KS, I haven’t seen “The Women” after I was persuaded it wasn’t worth my time.
@Hunter, anything with John Wayne (except True Grit, one of the greatest conservative statements put on film). Or Dean Martin. Or James Stewart. Most of the westerns you cite are really anti-westerns.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Thank you.
I loved “True Grit.” It was Kim Darby’s and Glen Campbell’s best movie.
September 15th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I guess it would have made sense to stop reading after the two-pronged,
“Wow! I really hate 60s Westerns!”
and
“I don’t like traditional Westerns.”
at the beginning of the “review.”
Thanks for letting us know you don’t like Westerns twice - I didn’t get it the first time.
Question: why bother reviewing the movie with such a powerful bias against its genre (and then, not bother to explain the bias).
September 15th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Hunter, High Plains Drifter was a ’70s western. How about substituting Hang ‘Em High?
So, Kyle: You “don’t like traditional Westerns”, especially “anything with John Wayne. Or Dean Martin. Or James Stewart.”? You know that you will be stripped for your Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy membership card for this, don’t you?
September 15th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
…and when you are finished being stripped for your card, you will be stripped of it. For such is the fate of all who forsake The Traditional Western.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:15 am
@ jic My Bad: “Hang ‘Em High” indeed.
This might be a fun topic - your top ten Westerns. Here are mine:
Unforgiven
The Searchers
Shane
Rio Bravo
They Died With Their Boots On
Lonesome Dove (TV)
Tombstone
True Grit
Deadwood (TV)
The Wild Bunch
September 16th, 2008 at 8:35 am
The Searchers
The Wild Bunch
High Noon
Rio Bravo
Pat Garret & Billy the Kid
The Professionals
Once Upon a Time in the West
True Grit
Red River
Junior Bonner
September 16th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Why is this rated “fresh”?
September 16th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Oooh I like this game. Also Kyle I must say I’m disappointed in your shunning of the western.
Rio Bravo (Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin duet, how can you not love that?)
Tombstone
Bandellero (Raquel Welch, nuff said)
The Searchers
Open Range
Lonesome Dove
Unforgiven
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
Rio Lobo
True Grit
Nothing better on a Saturday morning than either cheesy 80s cartoons, bad kung fu movies, or old westerns.
September 16th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Why, may I ask, did you laugh at Jeremy Irons’ accent?
There were Englishmen, with accents variously coloured by the American accents around them - isn’t it possible that he’s one of those? Or were you too busy guffawing to consider that?
Jus’ wonderin’.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Brandon writes: “Nothing better on a Saturday morning than either cheesy 80s cartoons, bad kung fu movies, or old westerns”
Yes, plus some Godzilla movies.
September 16th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
We only get one western a year (if were lucky) now-a-days. And I thought 3:10 And Jesse James were great. So if you like Westerns (which I do) you kinda have to go support a movie like this.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
@Stephen, I don’t know how you can lump together a traditional (dull) western like 3:10 to Yuma and an arty meditation on celebrity like “The Assassination…” Not a lot in common.
@Pete, I explained I don’t like trad. westerns in the interest of transparency. I don’t hide my views on anything, or at least I try not to. Explaining what my biases are provides additional, useful information to the reader. If you like most westerns, you’ll probably like this one. Why did I review it? Because that’s what I do for a living.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:41 am
To be fair to Kyle, you don’t have to like movies to criticize them. As Alfred Hitchcock once told Francois Truffaut, “a good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.” Critics pay nothing to see a picture, and their opinion is usually worth about the same.
September 17th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Hey, Kyle!
Do you know what the hell you’re talking about!? I just saw APALOOSA at a free SAG showing and loved it! A different kind of movie than last years 3:10 TO YUMA, and a more realistic, better western and movie. What’s important here are the characters, their relationships, and themes, and they won’t disappoint. APALOOSA should be nominated for some awards–Oscars, Golden Globes, SAG AWARDS. And Viggo should defintely be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Anybody that likes westerns, Harris and Viggo, and a literate film, DON’T MISS “APALOOSA”!
September 17th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Nicely put Hunter.
Kyle,
I had heard that Matt Damon was doing some sort of a symposium on his upcoming project at the Toronto film festival and that it was to be a film version (I imagine documentary) of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History. Did you hear anything about that?
September 17th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
@Hunter, you’re right! I don’t like any movies! That’s why I see 300 of them a year.
@Brandon, yeah, Damon was pitching that docu in Toronto but I didn’t get around to seeing it.
@Peter Solari: Er, are you actually Pete Hammond?
September 17th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
And Viggo should defintely be nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
Mortensen’s an excellent actor. I saw him recently in Eastern Promises. He was terrific.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
@ Kyle, you miss my point, which is not whether or not you like movies (and there are plenty of journalists who see 300 movies a year who can’t stand movies; I have met some of them), but rather that professional criticism of movies is, more than ever, almost worthless, especially in print media: the latter are a dying breed, as are newspapers themselves. They have become so irrelevant, especially with regard to horror or action pictures, that many film companies do not even invite the press to pre-release screenings.
I cannot in fact remember the last time I read a review of a contemporary movie in a publication of any kind that influenced me in any way to see a movie: my mind had been quite made up long ago, based on early reviews and insider info from a myriad of websites such as Ain’t It Cool, the Latino Review and the IMDB. Once the buzz starts to build a newspaper review is utterly irrelevant.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Hunter,
I agree to an extent. True newspaper reviews I do believe are obselete simply because the newspaper is obsolete. However I trust Kyle as a critic as much as any and with movie tickets being over priced as they are if Kyle gives something a negative review it carries some weight with me. I also check the tomato meter on Rotten Tomatoes quite a bit. Truthfully it was Kyle’s review of Wall-e that made me decide to not go see it.
September 18th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Westerns are usually crap and boring, except for the Spaghetti ones, and a dark reminder of how America was stolen from the Indians. The only good ones are the ones which make fun of the genre. Plus, John Wayne was a far right goon.
In no particular order, these ones are however watchable -
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Unforgiven
My Name is Trinity
A Fistful of Dollars
Little Big Man
Support Your Local Sheriff
Maverick
Back to the Future 3
The Outlaw Josey Wales
September 18th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Jules,
Just once I would like to see you say something positive without taking pot shots at America and Conservatives. I think should I ever be unfortunate enough to end up a client of the make a wish foundation this is what I will ask for…well that coupled with having the Deal or No Deal models as my harem (more in the western definition rather than the Islamic definition). Also I’m going to pretend you didn’t just list Back to the Future 3 as one of your favorite western movies. That’s like listing Spaceballs as your favorite sci-fi.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:27 am
‘Just once I would like to see you say something positive without taking pot shots at America and Conservatives.’
Don’t hold your breath on that one.
Back to the Future 3 is as strong a choice as many of yours. That flying train was cool.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I can’t argue that the flying train was bada** plus there was an added degree of comedy to Michael J. Fox faking an Irish accent. Still I must say it’s blasphemy.
How about Tombstone? That was a quality western.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
and a dark reminder of how America was stolen from the Indians.
Uh huh. By the British. There were lots of Indian tribes up and down the East Coast before the British arrived. In Canada too.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I seem to remember Val Kilmer was great in that. Can’t remember much else about it though.
As a kid, I used to love the really cheaply-made Spaghetti westerns with Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer. I think they made one non-Western in which they were both cops. A sort of fore-runner to the Police Academy crap.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Jules,
I’m kind of surprised you didn’t add Blazing Saddles in. Oh how about Paint Your Wagon? A musical western starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin is impossible to ignore.
You remembered correctly Val Kilmer was awesome in Tombstone. Even Kurt Russell managed to be less aggravating than usual in there.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Can’t argue with you on those two. The bean scene rocked.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Jules,
John Wayne was a Far Right Goon!!!! Why u little weed smokin, far left, liberal, American hatin, terrorist supportin, NRA totin whippersnapper! I have mind ta find ya and turn yur insides out, and stuff yur tallywhacker into a meat grinder. I’m old, grew up loving Big John, but did not like our interest in Vietnam. The only time Big John and I dissagreed…. But, a far right goon…them are fightin words varmint!
A little info:
“Sure I wave the American flag,” he said in 1972. “Do you know of a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I am not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be.”
And even those for whom Wayne represented the darker forces of the American spirit were not ashamed to admit that they admired and even idolized him.
“Even cavemen felt a little admiration for the dinosaurs that were trying to gobble them up,” Abbie Hoffman, the radical 60s protestor, said. And when he was reminded that Wayne represented support for Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and the Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era, liberal minded Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko did not disagree, but said, “I still like John Wayne.”
John Wayne was a real American…right or wrong you commie lovin leftist.