Appaloosa is a cookie-cutter western from its first minute to its
114th. Its good guys are tough and laconic, its bad guys are hairy and
dumb, and its Apaches are rogue.
Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen are Western samurai, marshals for hire
who ride from distressed town to distressed town, clearing out whatever
evil gang happens to be holding it hostage at the time. In the first
scene, a band of idiots led by a silver-tongued (and saggy-faced)
Jeremy Irons gun down Appaloosa’s three lawmen, freeing up the idiots
to rape and pillage. Harris and Mortensen show up and—in a series
of tense, entertaining scenes—out-tough the bad guys.
The obligatory plot complication: Renée Zellweger, a
swollen-faced widow who shows up and twitterpates Harris. She, of
course, becomes Harris’s only weakness. The bad guys, of course,
exploit it. The good guys, of course, prevail.
Aesthetically, Appaloosa goes down easy. Harris and company know why
we’ve come—adventure, one liners, and manly virtues like loyalty
and shutting the fuck up—and that’s what they give us. Two hours
later, a bad man lies dead in the dirt and a just man rides into the
sunset.
The film is not, however, kind to anyone besides its white men.
(Sorry to get all mid-’90s Culture Wars on you, but it’s true.) The
Chinese restaurant-owner, the aforementioned Apaches, and the Zellweger
character are either ciphers or monsters. Especially Zellweger.
(Spoilers start here.)
After being kidnapped by the bad guys, she develops a kind of sexual
Stockholm syndrome: She will, Harris says, “fuck anything that ain’t
killed her yet.” But not because she wants to—like Appaloosa’s
token whore, who has sex for money at the time and place of her
choosing—but because she has to. She identifies the alpha male in
any scenario—that is, the individual mostly likely to either
protect or rape her—and fucks him before she can be violated.
Appaloosa is subtle about this moral calculus: It puts rape in our
minds from the first scene—the three lawmen are gunned down after
trying to arrest one of the bad guys for rape and murder. Then the film
slowly, rhetorically, turns Zellweger into an animal:
“She wants to be with a boss stallion,” Mortensen says.
“There’s only one stallion in a herd,” Harris says.
“At a time,” Mortensen answers.
Slyly, almost imperceptibly, Zellweger becomes the film’s real
villain. The bad guys are, at least, loyal to one another and defend
their autonomy. She is loyal to no one. Not even herself.
A pack of dudes sitting behind me at the screening hated her. They
kept calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” and repeatedly implored:
“Someone shoot the bitch!”
Easy, buckaroos. That’s not how a real man behaves. 
Its how real men dealt with what was considered evil in those days. I would go so far as to say our views have not changed. The world over the one thing no one tolerates well is a loose individual, in this case a whore in disguise.
You Mr. reviewer have no idea what it took to be a real man in those days.
If you believe in equal rights as you elude to in your soap-box review, then Zellweger should be treated as a proper villain, woman or not.
So in fact the men sitting behind you were right on the mark.
Shoot the cunt.