The Salvation
This slick Western sure is good looking, but it just doesn't draw quick enough to leave a lasting impression.
Overview
At first glance, The Salvation appears to have all the elements of a classic old-school Western. A bloody tale of savagery and greed with a hardhearted villain and a hero bent on revenge, you can feel the influence of the genre’s most iconic titles, from Stagecoach to Unforgiven to Once Upon A Time in the West. Unfortunately, despite possessing all the right ingredients, director Kristian Levring stumbles in his execution, delivering a mediocre movie that will leave audiences feeling shortchanged.
Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen plays Levring’s protagonist Jon, an ex-soldier in the Danish army who has immigrated to the New World. After seven years of hard work, he and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) build a homestead near the town of Black Creek, at which point Jon sends for his wife (Nanna Oland Fabricius) and young son (Toke Lars Bjarke) back in Denmark. The family reunion is short-lived, however, when the duo are murdered by a pair of convicts on the day that they arrive. When Jon takes his revenge, he finds himself the target of the ruthless gunslinger Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose brother was one of the men who killed Jon’s family.
Levring is best known as one of the signatories of Dogme95, a filmmaking manifesto that stressed naturalism and forbade “superficial action". With The Salvation, he (thankfully) abandons these roots and embraces the full-bodied, widescreen aesthetic of the Western genre. Kasper Winding’s score captures both the hope and the menace of the barren American landscape, and while the cinematography doesn’t quite measure up to the best contemporary Westerns such as True Grit or The Assassination of Jesse James, it’s a handsome picture all the same.
So why doesn’t it work? Perhaps it’s the feeling that Levring is ticking boxes, trying to include all the typical hallmarks of a Western without ever giving them the time to properly develop. Running barely more than an hour and a half long, The Salvation is a film that consistently takes shortcuts in order to keep the story moving forward. The hasty manner in which Jon’s family is dispatched borders on the absurd, as does his own transformation from mild-mannered farmer to veritable Man With No Name.
The same needlessly hurried approach is taken with almost all of the story’s supporting characters. We soon learn that the villainous Delarue works for the unscrupulous Standard Atlantic Oil Company, who hired him to intimidate the folk of Black Creek into selling off their land. It’s an ugly arrangement with roots in historical truth, yet is only really dealt with in a single scene. Likewise, it would have been great to spend more time with the town’s morally put-upon priest-turned-sheriff (Douglas Henshell), who finds himself forced to “sacrifice a single sheep in order to save the rest".
However, the film's most egregious crime is wasting Eva Green. She plays Delarue’s widowed sister-in-law Madeline, mute since Native American’s cut out her tongue as child and she’s a fascinating figure played imposingly by Green. Yet like almost everyone else in this movie, she just doesn’t have all that much to do.
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