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Feb 23, 2015 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

After years of toiling to build a new life in the American West, Danish settler Jon welcomes his wife and young son to a land of freedom and opportunity. When a chance encounter with some ex-convicts leaves his family dead, Jon finds himself targeted by a vicious land baron and heads down the dark path of revenge.

Westerns have occupied a strange place in the cinematic landscape for the past few decades. Golden Hollywood’s equivalent of the action film, the genre remained popular long after the death of the studio system, before all but vanishing after a short burst of popularity in the early nineties. Whether it was the rise of CGI spectacle or the release of Unforgiven–the perfect elegy for the genre–westerns rode off into the sunset for close to a decade. Following the success of HBO’s Deadwood, the western has enjoyed a modest resurgence in recent years, with many films–The Proposition, Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford–focused on marrying gritty modern sensibilities to the elegiac myth-making at the genres core.

The Salvation seeks to continue this trend, but brings nothing new to the table. Directed by Dogme95 veteran Kristian Levring, The Salvation feels like a distant descendent of the off-beat early westerns of Clint Eastwood, specifically Hang ‘em High and High Plains Drifter. The vicious outlaws, the martyred family, the good man pushed too far. All of it is ably shot and acted, and the arid deserts of South Africa make a convincing facsimile of the American West, but everything, from the performances to the action choreography, feels perfunctory and lifeless. Mads Mikkelsen is well cast and well utilized as the film’s grim protagonist, but the rest of the cast deserves better. Anyone who’s seen Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance as The Comedian in Watchmen knows that he can play a laid-back sociopath to a tee, but as Col. Delarue, a former war criminal and Indian hunter turned oil company mercenary, he’s given no opportunity to let his humor and charm shine through. This goes doubly for poor Eva Green, one of the most engaging and dynamic actress of her generation, who here plays a mute widow who seems to exist only to be tied up and/or threatened with rape. Just because a film is set in 1871 doesn’t mean it’s not being made in 2015.

Ultimately, the film has less kinship with the westerns of yesteryear, instead feeling like a period exercise in the modern, Liam Neeson-led trend of grim revenge films. You could do worse, but you could easily do a whole lot better.

www.ifcfilms.com/films/the-salvation

Author rating: 4/10