The first marshal of Appaloosa lasts five, maybe six minutes into the tale: Upon arrival at Jack Bragg's ranch to arrest three of his henchmen, the sheriff and his deputies are gunned down in cold blood. Things are rough in 1882 New Mexico, and they're getting rougher.

Westerns are rare in 2008, and good ones are rarer. "Appaloosa" -- starring, co-written and directed by Ed Harris from the Robert B. Parker novel -- is a good if not brilliant one that puts some life back into the cinema's most beloved but moribund genre.

Seems the Bragg gang has been terrorizing Appaloosa at will on a daily basis. "We want our town back!" says Abner Raines, one of the town's three Huey, Dewey & Louie aldermen, at the job interview where Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) -- two strong, silent, freelance gunslingers -- are hired to replace the late lamented law-enforcers.

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'Appaloosa'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger.
• Rating: R for some violence and language.
• Web site: appaloosa.com

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Both the plot and the town seem totally stereotyped at first, like a Ford or Hawks film or Dodge City revisited from a "Gunsmoke" episode, complete with the entrance of the new foxy femme fatale "schoolmarm"-type, Allison French (Renee Zellweger).

"Are you a whore?" Cole asks, with characteristic directness.

No, not exactly. She's a piano player who'll soon be tickling the ivories at the local saloon and toying with Virgil's affections in this podunk town that looks to be four square blocks, max, yet has a newspaper ("The Appaloosa Gazette").

What's not stereotyped is the novel relationship between the two lawmen: a peacemaker who fights "with an odd stateliness" and a professional soldier-veteran of the Indian wars. They've been together 12 years, two halves of a single force, and they're as oddly civilized as their conversations.

Indeed, everybody (except Bragg) loves Mortensen, the rare cowboy with an eight-gauge shotgun and a post-eighth-grade education -- who steals the show.

Harris plays Cole with a fistful of Clint Eastwood mannerisms that give new meaning to the word "stolid." But he also has some sex-and-violence vulnerability issues that John Wayne wouldn't be caught dead or alive with. Zellweger is a fine, fickle minx. Jeremy Irons is just dandy as the outlaw whose British accent nobody ever seems to notice or attempts to explain.

"Appaloosa" toys with and enhances the threadbare conventions, taking us to an intriguing if not fully satisfying ending -- a kind of low rather than high noon, but with sunshine enough.