The Salvation 2014

With a cast that a lot of film-makers would die for, locations made for desolate western scenery, artistic cinematography and beautiful soulful music you could be forgiven for thinking that The Salvation would be some wonderful masterpiece western. A genre that whilst not in full revival has certainly moved off the slab and is staggering about the mortuary in recent years. Unfortunately the makers refused to take the bull by the horns but instead stayed safe and sure.

The set-up is interesting and different enough to grab the average viewers' attention. A Danish immigrant to the US awaits the rival of his wife from Denmark, having been in the harsh West for 7 years on his own. So far so good. Then have your hero being played by the enigmatic magnetic presence of Mads Mikkelsen and double that up with his brother, Mikael Persbrandt, both survivors the Second Schleswig War and you have an interesting and new twist on your traditional Oat Opera.

Unfortunately from this point on we get an Oat Opera. Which in itself this is not a bad thing personally I was hoping for a new twist on the tale. I did not get it.

What we get for our money is the senseless slaughter of innocents so that the protagonist has a just motivation for his slaughter. Very, very, film western. We are then treated to a very bad man in charge who seemingly enjoys murdering people willy-nilly for mainly money reasons and we are away. From this point on if you have watched more than two Westerns you know what is coming and how the film ends and so it does. This is the film’s biggest failing.

You have beautiful cinematography using South African vistas to reproduce the desolate and harsh west to impressive effect with atmospheric and haunting skies and lighting tying into the action on screen. Add to this, the aforementioned accomplished Danish actors and the ever consistent Johnathan Pryce, Jeffery Dean Morgan, the underrated and underused Eric Cantona and the wonderfully expressive, luckily for her, Eva Green, heroically eye-brow acting, which she nails easily, but I feel she done dirty in this role. Give someone as sublime and such a screen personality as her something to say for goodness sake.

The very atmospheric music is produced by Kasper Winding channelling The Last of Us’ Gustavo Santaolalla to such a point I kept expect Joel to pop up and get murdered senselessly but as similar as it seems it works perfectly. Jeffery Dean Morgan proves that his screen persona is pantomime baddy has his character that the audience must hate is so bad, so ‘evil’ it borders on comedy parody and as much as I enjoyed the film every time he spoke or did anything on screen it had a tendency to make me laugh or at best hiss and boo. Much more convincing was Eric Cantona as his number two, who with a few lines at best was left to portray the character with looks and posture. Less is more and in some ways at the least 'the Corsican' had more shades in there rather than just wearing a big black hat.

The plot is nothing you have not seen before time and time again, starting in Japan and culminating with Sergio Leone we really need a new angle, something fresh. When Leone brought the world the ‘Spaghetti Western’ he was trying to move on from the clean-shaven hero/baddy format with unshaven, unkempt, gunmen, blood, death and double-crossing. It was not new but it was in your face and sufficiently different enough to stimulate the imagination of the cinema-going public. In particular the motivation for the senseless murder and destruction is disappointingly trite and vanilla and also if just thought about for a few seconds collapses under the preposterousness.

The Salvation, whilst worth a viewing just due to the actors on display, is another slightly more modern version of the Spaghetti format. The story is, dare I say, melodramatic and somewhat simplistic, almost childish, none more so than Jeffery Dean Morgan’s 'set to 11' villain, and this detracts tremendously from the attempt at a western. It is not different enough to get excited about.

The visual effects are poor. The fires look like a video game’s fires and not a triple A video game either and for goodness sake have they never heard of squibs? Surely using electrical squibs and real controlled fires is cheaper than computer-generated effects?
I was looking forward to The Salvation and in some ways I enjoyed my viewing but I am left with the strong feeling that this was an opportunity missed. Still there is always next time.