Appaloosa
Appaloosa takes us back to the post civil war Wild West where former soldiers Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) are now soldiers of fortune looking for towns in need of law and order for a hefty price. They find exactly what they want in the dusty hamlet of Appaloosa where the sparse population is recently down by one sheriff and two deputies who never came back after heading out to arrest the murderin’ Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons with a variable Daniel Day Lewis American accent). The city fathers have no choice but to agree to grant the extraordinary powers demanded by Cole and Hitch as Bragg’s men are whuppin’ and whompin’ ‘round town with great abandon. They soon bring outer peace to Appaloosa but the inner peace of the new marshal gets very disturbed by the arrival of the piano player Allison French (Renée Zellweger). It’s not long before she and Cole are an item planning a love nest but as time goes on Allison’s virtue comes into question while the virtuous Virgil is continually thwarted with his efforts to have the surprisingly well connected Bragg swinging from the business end of a rope. For fans of the western genre Appaloosa does justice to frontier justice and even has the hero riding off into the sunset.