Danish writer-director Kristian Levring has a deep fondness for the American western. His love and admiration for the genre is evident in almost every frame of The Salvation (out today), a serious, gritty western that's beautifully shot and effective enough, despite the fact that there's very little life in it. in their characters.
It starts off pretty well, and Levring's heritage at first feels fresh and new. Mads Mikkelsen plays Jon, who, along with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt), immigrated to the United States from Denmark in the late 1980s as society pushed west. Westerns usually feel very American, but Jon and Peter speak Danish and their "outsider" presence makes us feel like we're about to experience a Western seen through foreign eyes. Jon waits at a train station for his wife (Nanna Oland Fabricius) and his son (Toke Lars Bjarke) to arrive from abroad, having spent the last seven years apart. Jon has the American Dream on his mind and plans to bring his reunited family to the home he has established, where he can hunt with his son and earn a living under the glorious light of the frontier sky.
Director: Randall Emmett
Writers: Adam Taylor Barker, Chris Sivertson
Stars: Robert De Niro, Willa Fitzgerald, John Malkovich
But his dreams quickly turn into a nightmare when some suspicious subjects end up sharing his stagecoach. Under the rule that if it happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie, it's not a spoiler, I'll continue (so stop reading this now if you consider this early development a "spoiler"). The two men point a gun at Jon and his family and the unimaginable happens. Jon is thrown from the stagecoach and spends the night running blindly across the open desert trying to follow the wayward carriage. When he finally catches up with them, he discovers that the men have killed his wife and child. He returns the favor by killing the men.
That story alone could have been the premise for a movie, but it only serves as a setting for this one. Unknowingly, Jon has just murdered the brother of a brutal thug, Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who controls a nearby town with his iron fist. Delarue kills and torments some of the townspeople and forces them to help find the man who murdered his brother. He also takes the opportunity to get close to his brother's "princess", a village prostitute, Madelaine (Eva Green), who sports a nasty cut on her lips and doesn't say a word, after having her tongue removed, supposedly for Indians as a victim. little boy.
Movies in this genre can't help but be visually magnificent, but this one in particular is shot with a poetic eye by cinematographer Jens Schlosser. Unfortunately, the characters that inhabit its beautiful world wander around like cold and unfeeling robots. Mikkelsen is a striking presence, but his character keeps his emotions so close to his chest that he doesn't feel human. For example, when he finds the body of his son, he hugs it dramatically, but doesn't let out a peep...or a cold.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan looks like a mustache-twisting cowardly bad guy, but his low, rumbling voice and his lack of emotion match Mikkelsen's emptiness. Ironically, only Madelaine's character seems to brim with feeling and she doesn't utter a single word in the entire film. Not that there's that much dialogue to begin with, but when a mute speaks louder than the other characters, that could be a bit of a problem.
After its convincing beginnings, The Salvation turns into a pretty straightforward revenge movie. Still, there's enough here to satisfy fans of the genre, even if it feels like we're treading on previously uncharted ground.