When I started watching this, I didn’t even know it was going to be a Western.

An improbable and trite story, it starts out when a father, desperate and broken, comes back to visit his daughter, who is running a ranch in the New Mexico plains around 1880. She is has two daughters and she hates her father, so much, that she is sending him away as soon as she sees him. Presumably he abandoned her and her mother, and she has not forgiven him, and will never give him a chance.

As the story goes, her older daughter gets kidnapped and taken away to be sold into slavery in Mexico by Indian bandits. This turns her around and she recruits her father to help her chase after the Indians. Off they go. A very unlikely story, and one we never really believe as we watch it.

Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones star in this Ron Howard movie. All three of them are bigger than this movie, and they make do. You will probably watch it all the way through, even though it’s too long, and you’ll say to yourself that this is one of the weakest Ron Howard movies.

Rating: **