MAYBE they don't make movies like they used to . . . how boring if they did . . . but that's no excuse for giving up on classic genres like the western or the musical without which there would have been no Hollywood.

TV veteran David Von Ancken bravely resists the temptation to shoot Seraphim Falls as a revisionist western . . . the only kind that seems to win critical approval these days . . . but instead goes back to the basics that gave the genre its original appeal, the idea of a mythic struggle played out against the physical grandeur of America's vast untamed landscape. We've become so used to the simulated reality of computer-generated action movies that there's an immediate exhilaration just in the sensation of being plunged with the characters into a real blizzard on a freezing mountains, and swept down rapids and over a waterfall in sub-zero temperatures. You can hear the air and the sounds of the wild, the crunch of snow, the gasping for breath. Cinema is unique in its ability to capture this physical immediacy, but too often it shuns it for the comfort of shooting on sound-stages or controllable locations.

Because Seraphim Falls is real, what happens to the characters is instantly believable. Pierce Brosnan, as the loner Gideon, doesn't have to pretend to be a bearded man on the run. As he crouches in the snow, trying to warm his hands, he palpably feels the cold and so do we. When a shot rings out and he falls over, it's as if we have been shot. His pursuers are a group of mercenaries led by an embittered Confederate colonel Carter, played by Liam Neeson with remorseless intent. No matter how often a wounded Gideon eludes his pursuers, they keep coming. Clearly Carver holds Gideon responsible for some grievous hurt, but what?

The longer we're with Gideon the more decent he seems, a survivor who kills only when he must, who is caught up in a fight to the end that he doesn't want.

As the action comes down out of the mountains, and Gideon briefly gets his strength back in the log cabin of a frightened frontier family, the chase becomes almost surreal, heading out into the sun-baked desert where Anjelica Huston as a snake oil woman materialises as if in a hallucination. Seraphim Falls is a primal stalk-and-kill thriller that draws on the conventions of a great genre . . . with touches of the moral ambiguity of Anthony Mann and the the stylised operatic excess of Sergio Leone . . . but always within the context of men dwarfed by the elements, which dictate the terms of their feud and determine their fate.

Neeson and Brosnan are inspired casting, Neeson with his brooding silence and iconic stature, Brosnan playing wonderfully against his suave 007 image and building on some fine performances in The Tailor of Panama and The Matador to reinvent himself a likable low-life rogue. It's great too, like the teaming of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, to find two of Ireland's finest stars playing opposite each other in such a powerful, gripping mainstream American movie.