While I’ll confess that most westerns have me at howdy, Old Henry is a determinedly low-aiming affair. He looks as though he’s having a blast and his co-stars do, too – and they all pull together to lay on quite a show.

It’s good to see Nelson carry a film on his own and he goes at it with gusto, clomping around the homestead sporting a moustache that resembles a draft excluder and a hat-brim so wide he could shelter old ladies beneath it. “You got the wrong pig by the ear,” he drawls. Ketchum says that Henry fights pretty good for a farmer and, come to think of it, doesn’t he know him from some place long ago? The hog farmer’s having none of it. Probably he should have left well alone, though, because now here comes a posse of genuine thugs, led by the villainous, monologuing Ketchum (Stephen Dorff), who claims he’s a sheriff and ain’t nothing of the sort. One day, while roaming the grasslands of the Oklahoma territories, Henry runs across a wounded man with a satchel of banknotes, hauls him back to the farm and saves his life, just like that. “Don’t it ever bother you sometimes that they eat their own?” asks Wyatt, but this doesn’t worry Henry, who surely saw far worse things occur during the bad old life that he may or may not have lived in the past. He has a meek teenage son, Wyatt (Gavin Lewis) and a mess of hogs out the back. Tim Blake Nelson grabs a rare and deserved title role as Henry, an ornery old pig farmer who may (slight spoiler) be a stone-cold cowboy killer in flight from a past he’d rather not talk about, dagnammit. The programmers could at least have played ball and put some saloon doors at the entrance, sawdust on the floor, maybe a spittoon by each seat.

Potsy Ponciroli’s film is a rootin’ tootin’ barrel of wild-west cliches, complete with bank robbers, a scared kid and a dastardly villain who wears a black hat. O ld Henry premieres at the Sala Grande here at Venice, with the sea at its front and the gondolas at its back and it’s hard to imagine a less appropriate setting.

Wild wild west movie review