Outlaw Justice.(Movie review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Ed Harris's Appaloosa and Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla put a new spin on two classic genres. John Powers reviews.

When you think of Ed Harris, you picture piercing blue eyes and Method explosiveness--he was born to play overzealous cops and Jackson Pollock. But there's clearly been a wryer, slouchier Harris hiding within his fabled intensity. It finally emerges in Appaloosa, a Western set in late-nineteenth-century New Mexico. Directed by Harris himself, it's a winningly low-key tale about keeping one's honor in a shifting moral landscape.

Harris plays fast-draw Virgil Cole, who, along with partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Morten-sen), works just this side of the law. The two go into bad towns and clean them up--by any means necessary. As the story begins, the duo is hired by the community of Appaloosa to help bring to justice a murderous rancher, Randall Bragg (a surprisingly restrained Jeremy Irons). Everything's going swell until Virgil falls for a piano-playing widow, Allie (Renee Zellweger), who may not be what she seems.

Based on a novel by Robert B. Parker, Appaloosa has the contours of a classic Western, but it deliberately mutes the horse-opera pyrotechnics--this isn't a movie about shoot-outs. It's about characters dancing along the shadow lines between good and evil, love and foolishness. Playing their scenes with touching delicacy, Harris and Mortensen bring out the warmth and sly comedy of their characters' friendship, a camaraderie so profound it needn't be spoken. It's this very transparency that makes Virgil susceptible to Allie, who's simply trying to survive in a coarse world where unmarried women often wind up victims. Giving her most layered performance in ages, Zellweger puts a cunning spin on her trademark innocence. Allie comes on sweet and frail, but she's about as easy to get a grasp on as a dust devil.

Ever since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie has made a career of purveying laddish delight in capers, ...