mgtbltp

Sydney (Hall). Hard guy. An ex gangster. Maybe it's just the Christmas season or maybe Sydney is seeking perhaps a personal redemption. He's in some Mojave desert pit stop trying hard to weasel some wings.

All the principals are superb. Hall portrays the tough love pseudo father figure in a solemn, standoffish way, you know he doesn't suffer fools normally but his humanity is leaking out of his exterior shell and he does his best for the two dimwits he has chosen to help. Riley is the lovable idiot, taking every wrong direction when he has a choice. His soul mate Paltrow plays the equally dense, a marriage made in a mental hospital. Soon after the ceremony John turns around and Clementine is gone off with a trick. Jackson as the not quite smart enough Mr. Cool, shows his chops here.

It's a Reno of noisy ding, ding, ding, casino hotels with bad lounge acts, dive motels, and small dumpy vinyl greasy spoons, all with the barest hints of Christmas, i.e., faint elevator music yuletide carol's on autopilot, or a pathetically stingy string of lights on a front porch.

It's called a Horror Western about a tribe of "troglodytes" that kidnap a couple of townsfolk and the posse that goes out to retrieve them.

The funny thing is this didn't have to be about a made up tribe of "troglodytes," if you read enough history, journals, and letters of the early frontier and the West you'd know that nothing that went down in this film was very far off from what the Native American tribes actually did to other tribes and to European colonists. I'm actually of the opinion that it could be that the PC powers that be would never greenlight a film that showed Native Americans as they actually were during certain sequences in their history.

In recent years especially with films like Dances With Wolves the general impression exuded is that with the Native Americans it was almost (except for the designated "bad" tribe, all "Peace Love Dove", one with nature like hippies or hobbits, sadly not so.

In this film just take away the strange voice calls and call them Iroquois, Ottawa, Hurons, Blackfeet, Sioux, Apache, Comanche, Yaqui, get the idea.