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In a Valley of Violence, written and directed by Ti West, starts out slow, picks up speed, and finally launches itself into a screwball standoff, but always with a slapstick hilarious energy... The final half-hour is violent and gory, and the body count throughout is impressive, but West and his actors manage to find just the right tone. These situations are played for the reality of them, which just highlights the entertaining absurdity.

West is a literalist who has found himself in a genre of myth and allegory. He applies the same principles as he did in his best earlier films: a derivative premise played at face value, diligent imitation, protraction. (It takes half of the movie just to set up the conflict between Paul and the marshal.) But all that produces is a by-the-numbers spaghetti Western that's kind of slow and uneventful—and the world has no shortage of those.

Making a detour from his usual supernatural fare, Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it. Hitting the traditional bullet points... his stripped-down story feels like a lazily compiled greatest hits of genre tropes.

Ti West does for this deeply coded genre what he did for the '70s/'80s horror movie in his House of the Devil. It's terrific fun, and less smugly ironic than such film-nerd pastiche tends to come off. It might be fairly said that West is too unquestioning of his simple, bloody revenge narrative, that he's too effusively delighted with its telling to pause for moral considerations. This tendency, however, is significantly mitigated against by the performances of Ethan Hawke and John Travolta.

West finds himself lacking the formal chops to do anything with it. It could be that the director's horror facility just doesn't port over so well to the western, but it seems more likely that the muted nature of the violence and action that crop up throughout In a Valley of Violence is actually a reflection of the morally-burdened, ex-Union soldier (Ethan Hawke) at its center. And that *is* interesting, but it also doesn't make for an especially engaging form for an old west thriller.

Portions of this film, such as the hijinks at a hotel, suggest tedious parody, with modern actors playing stock period roles that appear to mean little to them. But other scenes are played dead seriously, informed with a startling gravity that's reminiscent of the best moments of Trigger Man, The House of the Devil, and The Sacrament. In this fascinating juxtaposition, self-conscious genre gamesmanship wrestles with an authentic poetry of violence.

Some of West's stylized repartee and drawn-out dialogue scenes in In a Valley of Violence can't help but draw comparisons to Tarantino in ways that don't always flatter the younger filmmaker. West's film, however, has something The Hateful Eight crucially, almost defiantly lacked: a humane moral vision. The gunslinger-trying-to-suppress-his-inner-violent-tendencies archetype may not be new, but Ethan Hawke exudes reluctance better than even Clint Eastwood did in Unforgiven.

Ti West's cheapie spaghetti western In a Valley of Violence, featuring Ethan Hawke and the always great James Ransone, who hams it up gloriously as the petulant small-town bully with a six-shooter.

It nods to just about every trope ever trotted out. And that's all Violence is up to, really. Tarantino does a lot of nodding, too, but always in the service of an idea more imaginative than mere allusion, for better or worse. Same goes, to a lesser extent, for Austinite Robert Rodriguez. All Ti West brings to the Eastwoodian loner, the shootout, the saloon and so on is, evidently, going by the SXSW audience's reaction, what passes in some parts for humor.