Mel Gibson’s company produced “Seraphim Falls,” which might explain something about this film’s lusty taste for masochism. The bodily mortification Gibson pursues in films such as “Apocalypto” is on ample display here, too.
“Seraphim Falls” has an interesting premise that links it back to the kind of moody, psychological westerns that began to appear in the 1950s. But ultimately it stumbles over its own feet.
Somewhere in the snowy mountains of the West, a manhunt is under way. A bearded loner named Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) is being chased by Carver (Liam Neeson) for reasons we can’t imagine. Gideon is shot, chased over a waterfall and otherwise hounded out of the mountains and into the desert.
Gideon is resourceful, so he’s able to pick off some of the members of Carver’s hired bounty hunters (among them Michael Wincott and Ed Lauter). Other actors pass through, some of them playing characters of a regrettably symbolic nature – including Anjelica Huston and Wes Studi.
For most of the movie, we don’t have the slightest idea why Carver is tracking Gideon so ruthlessly (it is hinted something happened between them during the Civil War). Your inclination is to root for the pursued, and so Gideon becomes more sympathetic.
Withholding the purpose of the chase is the one interesting idea the movie has; this messes with our ideas of who the hero is. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough to carry the film through its drawn-out running time.
The New Mexico locations, photographed by Oscar-winner John Toll, are more vivid than the characters played by Brosnan and Neeson. Brosnan, in his scruffy gray beard and bearskin coat, takes a decent stab at shaking off the urbanity of his James Bond performances.
His efforts to start a fire in the snow while shivering from an ice-cold river-rapids swim is probably the best sequence in the movie, animated by Brosnan’s animalistic howls of pain. Now do you understand why Mel Gibson might have wanted to produce this movie?
Director David von Ancken, a veteran of television, leans on the physical pain and the wide vistas, but he also turns this chase movie into an existential quest. This sort of thing was still popular in the 1970s, but it feels outmoded today. At least the action still translates.
Liam Neeson is one of the stars of “Seraphim Falls.”
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