‘Horizon 2’ Review: Kevin Costner’s Slow and Flat Sequel Unlikely to Win New Fans

As vast and flat as its title, “Horizon: An American Saga” can carry many descriptions. Call it hokey or homespun, old-school or out-of-touch, all would apply. But don’t you dare say wistful, because star and director and producer and co-screenwriter Kevin Costner has not leveraged a good part of his fortune for mourning.

Costner has come to celebrate those old myths, not bury them – and that lends “Chapter 2” an unintentionally elegiac quality. Tumbling down the Lido once this year’s Venice Film Festival has become a ghost-town, and with an already canceled theatrical release, “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2” stands more as a monument to unmet ambitions, to the grand swings-and-misses more often than not left out of the Great American Narrative.

Of course, by furthering the very televisual storytelling rhythms that cluttered and confounded in “Chapter 1,” this latest volume is not likely to win over unfamiliar devotees nor secure a last minute theatrical rescue. But it should thoroughly satisfy the many homesteaders that made the earlier chapter a surprise VOD hit this summer, maybe giving Costner enough juice to get production rolling on chapters three and four. Time will tell if those subsequent chapters ever see day, so for the time being, the Saga’s big screen trail abruptly ends here. 

Picking up right where the previous coda left off, we start on American cinema’s most promising new cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. He plays Pickering – the near-certain charlatan making grand promises about a prosperous settlement named Horizon that sends countless families on the trail to nowhere. Take a good look at Pickering as he delivers his pitch to family of Irish immigrants in Chicago pub back in in 1859, because you won’t see the man again until the subsequent coda.

Instead, we flash forward three years to catch up with those immigrants wagons hitched and miles behind them, one of the many families following Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) to the Promised Land. More so than before, much of this film takes place on that trail, following the families and felons that make up this new pioneer class. There’s sturdy patriarch Owen Kittredge (Will Patton) and his Calamity Jane-esque daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman); there’s the ill-equipped Brits Hugh and Juliette (Tom Payne and Ella Hunt), and their Icelandic  tormentor Sig (Douglas Smith); and there are a bunch of other bit players, well costumed and properly whiskered, all lending background detail.

The settlers have created a community on the move, a nomadic village with the commensurate codes of propriety. Everyone knows what happens when one settler goes walking and never returns, and nobody is blind to the nightly sexual assaults hidden behind a wagon hide, but there are rules, dammit, and some things you just don’t say. That hypocrisy drives a wedge between the more modern Diamond and her taciturn pa – a divide that only expands once two narrative strands connect and nomadic Kittredge clan finally connects with newly widowed cousin Frances (Sienna Miller) at the two-hour mark.

Until then, the new-widow had been quietly sifting through the pieces of the settlement destroyed in the first film and now home to a Chinese milling community, whose entrance Costner announces with a blast of typically “orientalist” music. That’s just one more old fashioned affectation in a film whose precise definition of ‘timeless’ is the production period that ran about 15 years, but those were the glory years, and we could all use a dose of movie magic.

Only that magic – the sweeping vistas and horse chases and shootouts, in short, the very iconography that Costner so loves – comes in awfully short-supply here. The filmmaker wants to make the case for the big screen as the Western’s natural home, only he does so with the tenor and timbre of an historical soap opera. Despite the pulse-pounding coda that closed out the previous version with a promise of an even grander spectacle, “Chapter 2” instead plays slow and flat. Of course, within the arid plain certain MVPs emerge, with Michael Rooker fitting right into that Walter Brennan mold as a twinkly Irish military man with a thick beard and warm brogue, and Costner himself lighting up screen as a moral gunslinger bringing order to the new frontier, but those instances are few and far between, mirages in the desert.

Instead “Chapter 2” ambles on, ostensibly recapping the sacrifices and moral grey zones needed to build a nation, but mostly playing for time, padding out the ample three-hour runtime until a new closing coda promises fireworks and urgency with “Chapter 3.” On that front, you do have to credit Costner’s optimism.

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