Dark western 'Appaloosa' doesn't horse around

"Appaloosa," a new Western from writer-director-star Ed Harris, revives an old genre with high style and simmering tension.

Not to be confused with the 1966 Marlon Brando-Sidney J. Furie picture, in which Brando tried to recover his stolen horse, "Appaloosa" is the classy Old West story of a bloody, expert gun-for-hire, Sheriff Virgil Cole (Harris), his enigmatic and deadly deputy Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) and the tyrannical and murderous rancher, Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), whose reign of terror prompts the town fathers to hire Cole and Hitch.

The movie begins superbly, suffers a credibility gap midway and then gets too rushed and over-explanatory toward the end. But it's still mostly a superior version of a genre I love. And, if "Appaloosa" doesn't measure up to great town-taming Westerns like "My Darling Clementine," John Ford's masterpiece about the Earp-Clanton feud, "Appaloosa" is still visually gorgeous (thanks to cinematographer Dean Semler) and grippingly dramatic, an outdoor epic with a dark side.

Harris makes the movie work as both a classic Western and a revisionist piece. "Appaloosa" is a model in fact of the old postwar "adult Western," and it's at least as good as that similarly dark and classic sheriff-vs.-rancher tale, Edward Dmytryk's underrated 1959 "Warlock" - in which Henry Fonda, like Harris, played a taciturn death-dealing lawman.

Once again, as in his painter bio "Pollock," Harris proves himself a superb movie actor, a good, highly craftsman-like director and a generous filmmaker who likes to share the wealth with his fellow actors. Harris gives himself a plum role here, as grim gunslinger Cole, but he then hands an even better part to Mortensen, as the deadly but integral Hitch.

These two, who are obviously descended from the Earp boys and Doc Holliday, face the movie's equivalent of vicious Old Man (or Ike) Clanton - elegant Brit Jeremy Irons as ruthless cattle rancher Bragg.

They also have to deal with the sexiest, most conniving schoolmarm ever: Renee Zellweger, smiling like a little fox, as the promiscuous schoolteacher and avid piano-tinkler Allison French.

Harris and Mortensen are terrific here. Irons is a fine, arrogant heavy and Zellweger's French is one of the naughtiest pseudo-Clementines. "Appaloosa" keeps hinting at deeper emotional stuff, though the last gunfight returns us to the black-and-white tension of every such shootout from William S. Hart to "Unforgiven." It's just as effective here.

If you like Westerns, you should ultimately enjoy most of "Appaloosa." Even if you don't, you should appreciate its intelligence and deadly skill.

"Appaloosa"

Starring: Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons

Directed by: Ed Harris

Other: A New Line Cinema release. Rated R (violence, language). 114 minutes.