The Missing Review

If you've been hungering after a good ol' fashioned western for far too long, prick up your ears and pull on those cowboy boots because the new film from "Apollo 13" director Ron Howard has got enough breakneck pursuits on horseback, gunfights and marauding Injuns to make any aficionado happy. But don't raise your expectations too high because Howard's movie isn't a complex modern western along the lines of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" but a grand and half-decent action flick which just happens to be set in 19-century New Mexico. Cate Blanchett plays Maggie, a hard-working mother-of-two eking out an existence as a self-taught doctor in the Old West. When her long-estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones) turns up on her doorstep after years living with the Apache, Maggie brusquely turns him away but is soon forced to ask for his help when her eldest daughter is abducted by an Indian witch-doctor.

And while Howard takes pains to show the downright dirty, hard side of life in the Old West, his politically correct depiction of the relationships between Native American and whites is all too depressingly modern and simplistic. Opting simply for a goodies versus baddies backdrop, Howard includes cruel, drunken whites in the marauding kidnapping party led by the Indian brujo while making sure that Tommy Lee Jones is helped by an old Apache friend. The hackneyed father daughter relationship isn't any more successful either so it's a great relief that the undeniably good-looking action and Eric Schweig's brilliantly evil villain makes the film's hefty running time seem significantly shorter. Think "Ransom" rather than John Huston's "The Searchers" and you'll get the picture.