If L’il Ronnie Howard lives to be a million he ain’t gonna be John Ford, that’s for dang sure. This film has money painted all over the screen, but all we end up with is a zippy little genre film crying to get out from under the weight of Oscar-winner gilt. Trying to put over this cliched, nasty little story like it’s some kind of artwork of consequence resulted in slowing the pace down to a crawl. With a genuinely awful music score matching a pretentious mood, the chances for high adventure and no-holds-barred bloodthirst are nixed. This isn’t entirely Howard’s fault. With modern Westerns a certain painfully po-faced seriousness has crept in, and this is the problem with Pale Rider, Dances With Wolves, and others. You can’t enjoy yourself at a Western now, lest you think you’re not watching an iconic genre. It’s particularly egregious, considering this film is packed with horror-film jazz and dated stereotyping – chanting indians, rattlesnakes, witch doctors, and pretty white girls in danger from ugly savages. I thought the Indian mystic jive had gone out with the ’70s, but here it is folks, with eagles and signs and all sorts of peyote-inspired bull. Howard, for all the Best Director trappings, can barely stage a decent fight scene or shock edit. You’ve got actors of the calibre of Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones around, but they’ve both played the same sort of part far too many times. Evan Rachel Wood does fair work as the damsel in distress, considering the tacky role she has. The characters are a catalogue of contemporary screen types, with easily manageable traits and flaws – teenage daughter resentful of mother; mother resentful of her father; father out to prove his worth…blah blah blah. Nobly Tragic Death looms for somebody. Waiting to see the sleazy baddies’ comeuppance was the chief reason for watching, but even that’s a thundering failure, because Howard suddenly doesn’t seem able direct an action scene for shit, relying on that dodge-and-dive camerawork that’s so endemic in modern filmmaking. It is not authentic, or realistic, or artful: it’s just a pain in the ass.
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