Upon the death of his wife and son, who have been murdered on the hands of evils and corrupted men merciless, Jon Jensen, a young courageous European settler, who makes his mind to revenge from those criminals by shooting them, the thing that brings terrible for him, as he faces the corrupted baron, who seeks revenge for the murder of his brother.
Even when we know the familiar iconography and storytelling tropes of old American classics that are thundering toward us, it's great to see them again.
The movie as a whole is good, not great, but Mikkelsen elevates it, as does Morgan who plays one of the better frothing Western villains we've seen in awhile.
There's little to really complain about, save a couple of instances of iffy scripting, but the overall sense of familiarity leaves the whole thing feeling not much more than efficiently done.
It could be Danish filmmaker Kristian Levring's answer to the spaghetti western (this one shot in South Africa with American landscapes CGIed into the background) with a sensibility that echoes the savage frontier novels of Cormac McCarthy.
The Salvation is an enjoyable film, especially in terms of old-style genre filmmaking. It will certainly become a form of salvation itself, among the hordes of CGI blockbusters and senseless horror flicks that have taken over the theaters this summer.
The pace of the film is slow, tense and anxious, built upon a motivation for revenge between two antithetical men, who are united through a shared destructive ideology, cementing the absurdity of human ideals.