The contemporary white-trash environs of The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada might have ruled it out for consideration as a Western proper, but one is often reminded of that fine film while watching David Von Ancken’s post-Civil War pyschodramatic manhunt. Like Burials, Seraphim Falls is a gorgeously pared down travellin’ show. Mr. Von Ancken, the director of Oz and one of the million or so CSI titles, impressively embellishes these barebones with a keen sense for savagery. Bullets always hurt. Wounds always fester. The forbidding frontier is either killing you by heat or cold. This is Run Of The Arrow with added grit, Deadwood without the settlement.
Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan do sterling work as the hunter and the hunted. Forget everything you ever learned from Anthony Mann; Carver (Neeson) and Gideon (Brosnan) are elemental sorts locked in an elemental struggle. Though both are war veterans from opposing sides of the struggle, psychology comes a very poor second to the thrill of the chase. Neeson is a bounty hunter with a small army of mercenaries, a pack of doggies and a sizable arsenal. Brosnan is Grizzly Adams without the blandishments of civilisation.
The hunt soon falls into a tantalising rhythm. Mr. Neeson catches up. Mr. Brosnan escapes against the odds. As they stagger across mountainous terrain and blazing savannahs, an endlessly inventive screenplay provides them with the means to continue. Gideon, dying of hypothermia and blood loss, stays alive and ambushes a foe by crawling into the steaming innards of a dead horse. One by one, he picks off Carver’s men until a mono et mono stand off is assured.
The breakneck pace and dramatic tensions come a little unstuck towards the end of the third act. A flashback sequence, employed To Explain Everything Away, is over-cooked. And the final scene, a psychedelic desert trip replete with a mystical Injun and a charlatan saleswoman (Huston), seems out of place in any film that isn’t called El Topo or High Plains Drifter.
Just the same, I’ll be danged if I wouldn’t happily watch it over.