With such a great cast, I expected a great film, but all it did for me was put me to sleep, or to be more precise, used the control to turn it off. The film was slow moving, predictable and the script left much to be desired.As much as there are some people that are trying to take us back to the "good old days", this film reminds me why I wouldn't want to. It seems like everyone is overdosing in testosterone and stupidity and where the absolute meaning of life is drinking, fighting, womanizing, and being an absolute jerk.Sorry, but with things as they are in the world today, I can't sympathize with a bully as a hero.Again, quite a disappointment with so many great actors in the film.

Set in the late 1940s, The Hi-Lo Country is a strange mix of drama, romance, western, buddy movie and something that can be best described as an Americana version of Latin America's magical realism: there's even a witch telling the future, and her prophecy fulfills! The movie does not offer much in terms of action: it rather sets out to be a "slice-of-life" piece, taking a look both at the events and the changes occurring in all the lead characters. I can understand this kind of approach can be disliked by some viewers; still, I found this movie interesting and somewhat underrated (picked it one evening on the cable). If you like a movie that emphasizes the mood instead of the actual action and with a strong cast ensemble (watch for Northern Exposure's Darren Burrows!), this is for you. 7 out of 10.

This movie has all the ingredients to make a great movie. It is beautifully photographed with wonderful western landscapes. It has one of Woody Harrelson's best performances as a hard drinking, hard working, hard loving good old boy rancher. It has excellent support from Sam Elliot, Billy Crudup and Penelope Cruz. It is set in the late 40's, early 50's when small independent ranchers are being replaced by large commercial farms.The problem with this movie is that is focuses way too much on the three way relationship between Billy Crudup, Woody Harrelson and Patricia Arquette. Arquette and Harrelson are lovers and Crudup lusts after Arquette. This relationship is not believable because Arquette's character is untrustworthy, amoral, and a liar. The woman who is more interested in Crudup is the Penelope Cruz character. The movie never explains why Crudup would prefer Arquette over the much more beautiful and sexy Cruz. The Sam Elliot character is wasted. He does a good job of portraying the businessman rancher. He is not evil, but all the small time ranchers hate him because he is contributing to, and a symbol of, the end of small ranches. But it is not Sam Elliot that is destroying the small ranches, it is the progress of commercialization which Sam Elliot represents. It is this contradiction between good person Sam Elliot is and the evil that he represents that makes is character so interesting. This movie should have been more about Sam Elliot.The movie falls apart into silly soap opera / action movie like scenes at the end. It abandons the interesting character study and gives us emergency rescues in a storm, deaths, murders, cover-ups and "dramatic" revelations. Those scenes belong in some other movie.

Great to see a new western and this one was particularly good to look at: capturing the flat, wide western country with all its beauty and natural dangers and contrasting it nicely with the badly-lit, cramped and emotionally charged interior spaces of its bars, farmsteads and honky-tonks. Outside there might be sun, drought, wind and snow, all largely visited at nature's whim; inside there's all sorts of very human dangers, including: infidelity, cheating, financial and legal corruption, and witchcraft - which can all be largely seen as a breaking down of loyalty and trust. War, the demands of the market-place and changing times in general, are shown to have bought a dislocation to the traditional rural certainties of conduct and order; the same forces splitting both the community at large and individual families.Ed Buscombe's masterly review in Sight and Sound articulated my own slight sense of disappointment with the film. He rightly saw that the character of Big Boy, as played by Woody Harrelson, fails to convince that he is worthy of the strength of love and loyalty that Pete and others feel for him. As Buscombe says, his antics too often subside into a charmless boorishness - contrast this say with Kristofferson's Billy the Kid for Peckinpah, whose behaviour is equally wild but we never doubt his basic goodness and accept the affection in which he is generally held.The film's recreation of the1940s was very nicely done: with terrific locations and just enough of the right artefacts to suggest the period, rather than an over-dressed museum tableau. The film cleverly slips between that contemporary world and an oppositional timelessness in the unchanging rhythm of the cowboy's life. I liked the way the film's characters acknowledge the anachronistic effort required to follow the cowboy life in 1940s post war USA: "I hear you're having an old fashioned cattle drive" Mona says to Pete, and earlier when Pete suggests to Jim Ed Love, the cattle baron, that "people still drive their cattle to the railhead" he replies "only in the movies".More than a nod then to Red River, with its fascination with the changing demands of the market place and the effects those changes bring to ranch and cowboy. At heart HiLo is not much more than a rather tacky melodrama but its still very watchable: its lovingly shot, it just about keeps the western mythology alive and it has some great songs. It also has good supporting performances from Billy Crudup (Pete), Patricia Arquette (Mona) and Rosaleen Linehan (Mrs Big Boy), in particular.