‘Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2’: Venice Review

Dir: Kevin Costner. US. 2024. 192 mins

Saddle up there pardner: like the covered wagons at the heart of Horizon, Kevin Costner’s epic western continues to traverse some glorious Utah terrain slowly, tentatively, occasionally getting distracted and lost, before sallying forth again, heroically. The stubbornly naive Horizon series — which may encompass up to two more instalments – is both enjoyably retro and fascinatingly aimless as it attempts to resurrect an old genre with gleaming sincerity.

 Attempts to resurrect an old genre with gleaming sincerity

Very much a continuation of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, which screened at Cannes, Chapter 2 follows the same people across the same storylines, the most active direction coming via John Debney’s persistent, old-fashioned score which leads this epic hard by the nose to no particular destination. The fussily-conceived Chapter 2 – some of the storylines could come from Bonanza’s Ponderosa ranch or that Little House On The Prairie – is a little more dynamic than the opener.  There’s a comfort in knowing that every bad guy will get his just deserts in this prairie oater, after all. 

Pulled from theatrical release by Warners in August before closing out the Venice Film Festival, Chapter 2 ends with another bizarre finale which suggests there’s much, much more to come. (By the time Chapter 2 winds up, viewers will be already over six hours in Costner’s debt.) Fans of the first will be up for the ride, although a $30m domestic gross in June suggests there weren’t enough of them to sustain continued wide theatrical exposure. The episodic, strangely-edited and -paced nature of the project as is suggests that this will not be its final release format. 

There are no significant new players in Chapter 2 (apart from the arrival of a Chinese family, excruciatingly signified by ‘jaunty Chinese music’ in the score). The stories are still being told from a pioneer perspective, with scant attention paid to Native Americans. We’ve met all the lead characters already, and our familiarity makes Costner’s strange jumps between the storylines more palatable: at least we know who they all are, even if some of the finer details might have been forgotten. The film even seems to be getting a little bit tighter as it focuses mostly – at least in the first half – on the covered wagon trail led reluctantly by Matthew van Weyden (Luke Wilson). They are out to stake their claim to the mysterious Horizon, a fictitious plot of land deep in Native American territory in an Arizona valley which the unscrupulous developer Pickering (Giovanni Ribisi) has been marketing as a homesteader’s paradise. 

Following the wagons and the rifts between their occupants, Chapter 2 finds an uneasy rhythm. The self-centred British couple, played by Ella Hunt and Tom Payne, are in for a nasty comeuppance, and Douglas Smith’s Sig is a menacing foe. Their storyline hooks up with that of Owen Ketteridge (Will Patton) and his three daughters, the eldest of which, Diamond, is played by a sparky Isabelle Fuhrman. Their surname will eventually lead us back to the well-dressed widow Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller), from Horizon’s first chapter, and her daughter Lizzie. Some of the stars of the first instalment start to melt away, including her suitor Sam Worthington, who volunteers to be posted ‘back East’, while his military superior played by Danny Huston barely has a few lines here. 

Elsewhere, of course, we have Costner’s character, taciturn gun-slinger Hayes Ellison, straight out of central casting, who, after some entanglements with the badass Sykes clan in Chapter 1 — in which he killed their most interesting psychopathic member – has rocked up on a horse-wrangling ranch policed by another pyschopath. Costner seems to have lost interest in the story of Hayes’s sidekick Marigold (Abby Lee) from the first film, and she’s only awarded a few paltry scenes. But it’s hard to remember what the original beef with the Sykes was all about, so Hayes finds a new one here.

Rest assured, visuals, again provided by DoP Michael Muro, are as clean and gorgeous as they were the last time out — particularly in the horse-wrangling ranch, but also in the Utah valleys and plains. There’s always something to look at, when you’re not distracted by the gleaming white teeth of all the protagonists, or how Frances Kittredge is so good at laundering her crisp shirts when she physically does not have a roof over her head. This is no Meek’s Cutoff.

It’s mythic stuff: Costner and his co-writer John Baird would find it far too tawdry to linger in the mud of reality. Bad guys are evil and die, literally, all the time. There are noble women like Frances, and prostitutes. Funny accents abound. We’re a long way from Dances With Wolves, as the Native American tribes here circle their sacred creek, presumably exhausted after burning the settlement down the last time. And Costner’s Hayes, like everyone else, is headed towards Horizon, and a long-promised and lengthy reckoning.

Eyes to the Horizon, viewers! There’s more a-comin.