`The Missing' updates Western with gripping characters.(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: Michael Wilmington

Good movie Westerns these days may be too few and far between, but Ron Howard's "The Missing" is almost a great one. Set in 1885 New Mexico, this dark, bristling adventure stars Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones as two unlikely allies: a tough, grieving frontier mother and her despised, long-absent father, joined on a hunt for the woman's missing teenage daughter who has been kidnapped by a band of renegade Apache scouts for sale into slavery in Mexico.

Maggie Gilkeson and Samuel Jones are richer, deeper and more memorable than the people we usually see in adventure movies. Maggie, wonderfully played by Blanchett, is a hard, embittered frontierswoman who rules the roost on her isolated ranch, living with her lover Brake (Aaron Eckhart) and her teenage and preteen daughters Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood of "Thirteen") and Dot (Jenna Boyd). Samuel is the man who made her bitter, the father who left her family 20 years ago to live among the Indians and now turns up snakebit and needing care. But, soon after, when Brake is killed and Lilly taken, Maggie turns to Samuel for help in tracking down and rescuing her daughter.

The first part of the movie is packed with horrific images evoking something we rarely saw in the first golden heyday of the movie Western (1940-62): a west that is vast, cold, lonely and full of danger. As the tiny posse _ Maggie, Samuel and Dot _ heads south the picture moves from a landscape strikingly wintry and violent, full of black trees and glowering skies, to an inferno of rock-strewn deserts and towering hills. It's the deadly site of the inevitable final showdown with the outlaw leader and Apache witch, Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig).

But, though the images of "The Missing" are majestic, it's the characters that make the film so unusual: not just Maggie and Samuel, but selfish daughter Lilly, the terrifying and supernaturally gifted Pesh-Chidin previous calls him Pesh-Chidin; wouldn't that follow for successive references? and his mixed-race gang, Samuel's old Apache friend Kayitah (Jay Tavare) and, in a juicy cameo, Val Kilmer as U.S. Cavalry Lt. Ducharme, whose troop becomes almost tragically involved in the hunt.

The material of "The Missing," based on the 1995 novel "The Last Ride" by Thomas Eidson, is very reminiscent of John Ford's "The Searchers," the 1956 Western classic with John Wayne as the Civil War veteran and loner ...