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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Salvation

THE SALVATION (Kristian Levring). 92 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (April 24). Rating: NN

Where to watch: Netflix 


Shot in South Africa with an international cast, Kristian Levring‘s The Salvation would like very much to stand with the classic westerns of decades past.

The formidable Mads Mikkelsen stars as Jon, a Danish immigrant in 1871 Wyoming who avenges his family’s murder only to find himself hunted down by a criminal (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) out for payback of his own.

But Levring and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen have mistaken cliché for profundity. The Salvation is a movie about squinting gunmen, cowardly homesteaders and duplicitous townsfolk, and Eva Green turns up as a mute widow who gets slapped around a lot. Worse, Levring plays out his generic premise at a grindingly slow pace, staging a series of standoffs and showdowns against a hyper-saturated, digitally tweaked landscape.

But all the post-production fiddling has the strange effect of plunging The Salvation into the uncanny. You will never once mistake it for the real thing.        

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