FilmFemme

Appaloosa, a stylish Western starring the intimidating and rugged Ed Harris, the sexy and suave Viggo Mortensen (yes, why, feel free to take advantage of me on a staircase, that would be just fine, actually…) and the inexplicably employed Renee Zellweger (I’ll be damned if I’m going to search out the e with an accent mark for her) is only playing in 6 theaters in Los Angeles County.  As you might imagine, there are a lot more than 6 theatres in Los Angeles County.  Why might that be?  Inquiring FilmFemmes want to know!

The answer that I have deduced is that it is because it is such an awful movie.*

Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hicks (Mortensen) — oh god, those NAMES!! — come to Appaloosa offering their services as vigilante law enforcement to take the town back from Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons channeling Daniel Day Lewis channeling Daniel Plainview) and his band of rowdy outlaws who killed the last sherrif, or something.  There’s a lot of intimidating, mainly in the form of Viggo Mortensen silently posed with a shotgun and Cole is briefly distracted by the arrival of Allison French (Zellweger) who is single and “not a whore” but is still kind of a whore.  Oh yeah, there is nothing likable about any of the women that appear in the movie, either, which is something I tend to note.  Anyway, Cole and Hitch’s main objective is to convict Bragg of murder and watch him hang in the name of justice.  They encounter obstacles, find out that Allison is kind of a whore, have some gun battles, ride some trains and eventually reclaim Appaloosa.  Kind of.

Ed Harris directed the script that he co-wrote which reads like someone had a screenplay checklist that included a couple of plot points and some character quirks.  The story is fine, passable Western fare with outlaws, some violence, some horses and a little bit of romance.  But the story drags on, the goofy jokes completely negate any sense of caring you might have.  And oh, you have to look at Renee Zellweger for a significant portion of the movie.

 *Turns out the answer is that it is not in wide release until October 3rd.  I like my reason better.

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