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. recommended