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Critics Consensus: It's all but impossible to add anything new or fresh to the traditional Western, but -- thanks in no small part to Mads Mikkelson's performance -- The Salvation comes close.
Critic Consensus: It's all but impossible to add anything new or fresh to the traditional Western, but -- thanks in no small part to Mads Mikkelson's performance -- The Salvation comes close.
View All The Salvation News
All Critics (79) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (57) | Rotten (22) | DVD (1)
In an untamed world where hypocrisy is loud and where no one can be trusted, salvation is one's own business and actions speak louder than words.
Wild West vengeance gets a terrific homage and a bloody reckoning in this oater excursion ...
Lacks enough complexity to hold cliché at bay, and the CGI-heavy visuals are distracting.
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 Salvation is severe and bloody stuff.
Surprises are few and far between in "The Salvation," but for Western fans looking for a fix, it'll do the trick.
There may be great ugliness lurking inside the soul of every man walking around in "The Salvation," but Levring brings it out beautifully.
An excellent entertainment that revels in Western movie cliches, its social commentary subtle and maybe a little subversive.
The Salvation is a gorgeous-looking western with no other aims than being a gorgeous-looking western.
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.
It's dull. It's literally, if not metaphorically, bloodless.
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.
Severe and violent revenge Western that doesn't offer a lot of surprises along the way. While the daylight scenes look great and remind of classics of the genre, the cloudy twilight and night scenes are so full of CGI they look horribly fake. Still, fans of a pretty straight forward John Wick in the West kind of flick could find satisfaction here. Either way it's over sooner than you can blink.
Super Reviewer
Did you know that there were Danish people in the old American West? Well yes, there were (and that really seems to be the main point in the proceedings here, just to say THAT), and they struggled like everyone else to forge their portion of American opportunities. Ah, but some bad guys gotta mess with them ... and so, in the tradition of Sergio Leone, let the ass-kicking begin. It's got it's moments.
A tense and well-constructed old-school Western that benefits a lot from a stunning cinematography and production design (with its amazing sets built from the ground in South Africa), as well as some excellent performances put in by a very sharp cast.
I suppose the film succeeds as a throwback to the violent anti-westerns of the late 60s and early 70s, but it does so mostly by being extremely dour. I don't necessarily mind that, but if your plot is going to be this predictable, there should be some fun involved.
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