Westerns are back on the Hollywood menu and lovers of a genre capable of saying more about America than most others should be grateful. And if David Von Ancken's film promotes this trend, it deserves a hearty cheer. Not least because it looks a treat as shot by John Toll, first in the snowy wastes around New Mexico's Taos Mountain and then in the hot and arid desert not far away.

Set during the aftermath of the Civil War, its protagonists are Pierce Brosnan's Gideon, a lone survivor from the Confederate army, and Liam Neeson as the former Colonel from the opposite side who has raised a posse of men to hunt him down.

The reason is not divulged until late in the film but the opening sequences would be difficult to beat.

Found on the freezing mountainside, Gideon is shot in the arm, tries to escape across a dangerous river, half drowns and then tries to pick the bullet out with his knife. He is now half-dead but somehow survives. Whatever he does, however, cannot shake off the posse, well paid to bring him in.

The relentless pursuit continues until we know, through a flashback, exactly why Neeson's former soldier wants him so badly. These two actors, shot against some stunning backgrounds, could hardly do better with the Von Ancken's spare screenplay, and in the first half hour Brosnan shows that he's very much more than a capable Bond.

It is towards the end that the film seems to change gear from an impressive realism to an attempted mythic quality that's less successful. Anjelica Huston, for instance, suddenly appears in the middle of the suffocatingly hot desert as a mysterious medical hustler in a horse-drawn carriage and, when the two men meet face to face, the basic truthfulness of the film begins to evaporate.

The director, well-known in America for his television work, lets his ambition finally get the better of him perhaps, so his film finally recalls a less convincing version of those of Anthony Mann which managed realism and the mythic without a false note.

Still, the performances of Brosnan and Neeson, augmented by those of Huston, Michael Wincott, Ed Lauter and Robert Baker, hold the attention throughout. And Toll's visual strength is a very considerable asset.