Appaloosa (Harris '08)

So, do you want your westerns to be contemplative, beautiful and well-acted? Rent last year's brilliant "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." Do you like your westerns dull, ugly, unoriginal and mediocre in every possible way? Go waste $10 on "Appaloosa." This is one of the most disappointing films of the year. I had high hopes for another great modern western, maybe not along the same lines as "Assassination" or "The Proposition," but maybe something at least as fun as last year's "3:10 to Yuma." Instead I got this. The acting was the best part, and it rarely went beyond "pretty good." Ed Harris was his usual solid self, and Viggo Mortenson and Jeremy Irons were both great. Unfortunately, Renee Zellweger, as usual, drags the film down whenever she's on screen. Her romantic side story is the worst part of this film, but not all of that can be attributed to a bad screenplay, even though the screenplay is pretty bad. There are countless attempts at humor, but they all fail, as do most attempts at creating a connection between the two leads (Harris and Mortensen). There is some chemistry between the two, but all of that comes from the actor's abilities. The story itself is uninteresting and does little to separate itself from dozens of B-westerns that came before it. I appreciate the attempts to recall the great westerns of old, but they were better than this. One of the stranger things about this film is how ugly it is, but it isn't ugly in a good, gritty way like Leone's films, it's just ugly. The scenery is uninteresting and the camera angles are uninspired. Usually, I don't notice a film's score the first time I see it unless it is really good or really bad, and the score was the worst part of this movie. It sounds like an episode of Gunsmoke mixed with Walker Texas Ranger. Don't see this movie.
Rating (out of ****) *1/2