APPALOOSA (2008) ** It takes 'em maybe ten, ten minutes to set up an all-time classic Western dual between Ed Harris and Jeremy Irons (and whoever jumps in). It could have been brilliant, it could have been great, it would have been hard to handicap. I guess I would have bet on Jeremy and his ten against Ed and his one, but I was ready. It would have been a great western. Short, but great. The minute Jeremy walks out that door without a shot fired you know they're never going to recover. When Renée Zellweger gets off that train a few minutes later, you know it's going to get a whole lot worse. The male leads continue in their brilliance, perhaps dropping a notch but it's hard to tell since every time Zellweger gets into the picture-or worse, speaks-the bottom just drops out of the suspense and it's difficult to restore any credibility to anything. Actually, eventually Viggo Mortensen overtakes everybody, to my mind. It's three damn good performances, and one pathetic one. It might have been a hard role to do perfectly, the female one, but it was an easy one to at least get some ambivalence going with…any other female in the picture, for example, would have been better.
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