Deputy Everett Hitch, played by Viggo Mortensen, left, and Marshal Virgil Cole, played by Ed Harris, move in on an outlaw in Appaloosa, which also stars Renée Zellweger and Jeremy Irons.

Warner Bros.

Midway through Ed Harris’s Appaloosa it became clear why Hollywood doesn’t turn out more westerns: There’s nothing much new to say in the genre.

Westerns were such a movie staple from the 1920s to the early 1950s, and then on television from the 1950s to 1960s, that the basic good guys-bad guys concept has been pretty much used up. Aside from last year’s 3:10 to Yuma, which was a remake of a 50-year-old film, and Kevin Costner’s Open Range in 2003, western scripts haven’t attracted much attention in Hollywood.

Appaloosa is Harris’s baby. He directed and stars in it and co-wrote the script based on Robert B. Parker’s book and it has all the western archetypes firmly in place.

Harris and Viggo Mortensen play a couple of lawmen for hire whose stock in trade is bringing law and order to lawless frontier towns. Jeremy Irons is a rancher who is the self-appointed boss of Appaloosa, a hamlet in the New Mexico Territory of 1882, using his hired guns to terrorize the good citizens. Renée Zellweger is the prim piano-playing widow, Allison French, who arrives on the dusty train in the dustier Appaloosa.

It’s a familiar landscape. The script doesn’t go very far in surprising us with much that’s new. Aspects of two heroes who arrive in a lawless town to clean up the place go back to the start of western movies. This aspect of Appaloosa recalls The Magnificent Seven, itself a reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese classic The Seven Samurai.

We see that Irons’ Randall Bragg is lower than dirt right at the start of Appaloosa when he guns down the local sheriff and two of his deputies who have come to arrest two of Bragg’s hired hands for raping a woman and murdering her husband.

Once the Appaloosa town fathers hire Harris’s Virgil Cole and Mortensen’s Everett Hitch, it’s clear that there’s going to be a lot of gunplay in store. It comes very quickly, in fact. They’ve been on the job only a few minutes when they find one of Bragg’s varmints urinating on the floor of the town saloon, shooting the man and his partner dead. Why was the man urinating on the saloon floor? Did anyone in the real Old West ever openly urinate on a barroom floor while everyone else stood around looking helpless? Would anyone be shot for that? Probably not. It’s a disgusting moment, but it serves to show that Virgil and Everett won’t take any guff from anyone. It puts Bragg on notice that his days are numbered.

Later, in an unnerving moment designed to let us know that anything is possible with the hair-trigger Virgil, he savagely beats two men to within an inch of their lives for swearing in front of a lady. Yipes! It’s a shocking moment, but it seems over the top.

There’s an attempt to create a romantic triangle between Virgil and Everett and Allison that seems as though it might take Appaloosa into new territory, although it was a subject touched upon in 1953’s classic Shane. But later the triangle is shattered by an offbeat situation that comes out of nowhere and presents an unexpected side of Allison. It makes Virgil’s continued romantic feelings toward Allison, whom he sees as his last chance at love, seem foolish.

On the other hand, there are good give-and-take exchanges between Harris’s Cole and Mortensen’s Everett which make them seem as though they’ve been partners for many years. Harris is more distant and aloof, however. He’s coolly determined and there seem to be storm clouds brewing in his steely eyes. Thankfully, a running gag makes him seem more human when he has trouble getting big words, such as “sequestered,” out of his mouth. Mortensen is more accessible as Everett, confident and sometimes even playful, with a twinkle in his eyes that gives some of his amusing asides a funny lilt.

Irons eventually gets to turn Bragg into a slightly more than one dimensional bad guy when the character begins feeling that he has gotten away with his misdeeds. Why, even the town fathers are coming around.

If Zellweger’s Allison, with her little chipmunk-cheeked primness, always seems to be hiding something from Virgil and Everett, you would be right. Their discovery doesn’t serve her character well and makes the film’s ending seem unlikely.

Western fans will find a lot to applaud in Appaloosa, including the scenery and the solid good guys-bad guys sensibilities. But a classic western it is not.

***Appaloosa

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

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity, adult themes, brief nudity.

mjanuson@projo.com