JUST BECAUSE WESTERNS are mostly defined by their conspicuous absence these days doesn't mean quality shouldn't still triumph over quantity. Scarcity of product is no excuse for mediocrity; the genre has a history as long and storied as the frontier land it calls home, which can't help refracting and reflecting on the few new excursions into its warhorse-opera territory. One can't help thinking of the many ghosts of oaters past that haunt The Missing's dusty trail – The Searchers' retrieval plot and rocky racial disharmony, the many revisionist noble-savage tales of the '60s, even the blood-soaked Bosch tableau of Cormac McCarthy's totemic Western novel Blood Meridian – and how this film's pale riders can't help paling in comparison. Its dark fable of a frontier woman (Cate Blanchett) and her quest to retrieve her kidnapped daughter from bloodthirsty Indians, with the help of her danced-with-wolves deadbeat dad (Tommy Lee Jones) has the general ingredients for an intriguing Electra-complex take on how the West was wrung, but don't be fooled. Strip away the six-guns and it's little more than your basic thriller in sheepskin clothing. Director Ron Howard knows how to marinate a Fordian landscape in bleakness (the harsh, barren vistas would suit Robert Frank's Americans), but his flirtation with genre conventions/archetypes feels half-digested, and his storytelling here merely serves to demonstrate the vast gap between being an artistic filmmaker and a functional one. Even the recent Open Range strives toward Anthony Mann-hood; this feels like it's lucky if its coach makes it to Delmer Daves territory. The Missing isn't a particularly bad movie, just a rather bland one; the real tragedy isn't that it misses its western marks so much but that it aims low enough to shoot itself so consistently in the foot. (David Fear)