he El Paso, Texas–born Thomas Haden Church returns to the range to play Tom Harte, a burned-out cattle wrangler persuaded to join a herd-moving expedition led by his estranged uncle, Prentice Ritter (fellow SAG nominee Robert Duvall). Along the way, young Tom impulsively hires a fiddle player; shares his uncle's protectiveness toward a group of enslaved Chinese orphans, one of whom he falls for; and undertakes many of the expedition's forceful tactics.
When the need arises, Tom can put a fallen horse out of its misery and take down an assassin with equal skill. The character, as Church makes clear, is carrying around emotional baggage related to an uncomfortable parting, long ago, from his mother. Prentice is dead-on correct that his nephew should follow the trail rather than toiling as someone else's hired hand, but it will take many miles for Tom and this ersatz father figure to arrive at a level of trust. That is to say, it will take Tom the aforementioned duration; Prentice has no beef with his nephew and seems to know exactly what the young man needs. And as dangerous or hair-trigger angry Tom might seem to those he perceives as a threat, he never outwardly questions his uncle's authority. The two actors get a satisfying if uncertain reconciliation as the trail reaches its end, and Tom's late, halting declaration to Sun Foy (Gwendoline Yeo) may well be enough for the young lady, even though the two can barely communicate. The man who played dimwitted mechanic Lowell Mather on TV's Wings has learned to do much with very little.