The Salvation (15.)
Directed by Kristian Levring.
Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Johnathon Pryce, Douglas Henshall and Eric Cantona. Partly subtitled. 92 mins
After Leone every country has felt entitled to have a go at the western. This Danish bash at making one doesn’t bring anything much new to the genre, other than a smattering of subtitles. Whenever European filmmaker appropriate Hollywood forms Americans viewers understand that they are in for a very severe ticking off and so it proves with this skimpy How The West Was Wrong treatise.
This Smorgasbord Western is more a European buffet – the prairies are filled with Scots, Spaniards, French and English. The only common trait is that each and every one of them is a sniveling little turncoat coward, unable to stand up to the sadistic American bullies who run everything. So when Norwegian settler Mikkelsen's finds himself in a deadly conflict with the local bandit, JD Morgan, nobody backs him up. The Salvation is a bleak, grinding vision of the west and it plonks down its wares with little in the way of subtlety or subterfuge – Oh rotten America, where everybody looks out for No 1, there is no rule of law and what there is just protects the rich and, spoiler, everything is motivated by “sticky oil.”
Of course this would play fine if the film was up to snuff but it isn't. You never really believe that this is the west, it feels like people play acting on an old western set, in the way that Carry On Cowboy did. Of course that could be quite an effective way of subverting our notions of the wild west and showing it as it really was, but the film jettisons that when Mikkelsen turns out to be a sharpshooting slaughterhouse vengeance machine. They cannot find a replacemnt for the American value that might is right and the just always have the fastest and surest trigger hand; unlike Carry On Cowboy where in the final showdown with the forces of evil, sheriff Jim Dale triumphs through sneaky subterfuge and cunning.
The Salvation (15.)
Directed by Kristian Levring.
Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Johnathon Pryce, Douglas Henshall and Eric Cantona. Partly subtitled. 92 mins
After Leone every country has felt entitled to have a go at the western. This Danish bash at making one doesn’t bring anything much new to the genre, other than a smattering of subtitles. Whenever European filmmaker appropriate Hollywood forms Americans viewers understand that they are in for a very severe ticking off and so it proves with this skimpy How The West Was Wrong treatise.
This Smorgasbord Western is more a European buffet – the prairies are filled with Scots, Spaniards, French and English. The only common trait is that each and every one of them is a sniveling little turncoat coward, unable to stand up to the sadistic American bullies who run everything. So when Norwegian settler Mikkelsen's finds himself in a deadly conflict with the local bandit, JD Morgan, nobody backs him up. The Salvation is a bleak, grinding vision of the west and it plonks down its wares with little in the way of subtlety or subterfuge – Oh rotten America, where everybody looks out for No 1, there is no rule of law and what there is just protects the rich and, spoiler, everything is motivated by “sticky oil.”
Of course this would play fine if the film was up to snuff but it isn't. You never really believe that this is the west, it feels like people play acting on an old western set, in the way that Carry On Cowboy did. Of course that could be quite an effective way of subverting our notions of the wild west and showing it as it really was, but the film jettisons that when Mikkelsen turns out to be a sharpshooting slaughterhouse vengeance machine. They cannot find a replacemnt for the American value that might is right and the just always have the fastest and surest trigger hand; unlike Carry On Cowboy where in the final showdown with the forces of evil, sheriff Jim Dale triumphs through sneaky subterfuge and cunning.
