Overlooked Movies: Forsaken

People say that there aren't many western movies being made these days, but there seem to me to be quite a few of them.  They're just coasting below the radar.  One of them I hadn't heard about is Forsaken, which stars Kiefer Sutherland as the gunslinger who's given up his guns and Donald Sutherland as his estranged father, a preacher who finds some things hard to forgive.

When Sutherland returns to his home after giving up his gunslinging, he finds that the bad guy (Brian Cox) is buying up all farms.  If the farmers don't want to sell, Cox has his gunslingers to take care of things.

I've seen movies with this plot a hundred times or more, and Forsaken plays it absolutely straight.  There aren't any twists or turns.  It goes from point A to Point B just like anything from Monogram ever did.  The only difference is that Brian Cox uses the F-word several times, for some reason.  There's nothing else in the movie that comes close to getting it rated R, so it's a strange choice.

I liked the scenery in the movie, I liked the soundtrack, and I liked the performances.  Demi Moore is playing about 30 years younger than her age, and she does just fine.  Donald Sutherland looks like an Old Testament prophet and does a couple of brief sermons very effectively.  Kiefer Sutherland is pretty one-note, but he's good at that note.  The scenes when he's using an ax should've been cut, though.  It's pretty clear that the ax and he aren't very well acquainted.

Maybe I was just in the mood for a movie like this, but I found it quite satisfactory.