Echoes of War

While all the naturalistic overtones might suggest faith-based Terrence Malick, those committed performances keep the film involving, however recognizably those echoes might resonate.

The scriptwriters, Kane Senes (who also directed) and John Chriss, keep the family secrets too bottled up, but the actors, who include William Forsythe as the McCluskey patriarch, play it with dark vigor.

Most of Echoes Of War amounts to Hints Of Aggression, with the film struggling to find enough incident to reach feature length.

I could not see it as anything more than a giant bore that presents viewers with the most familiar plot devices imaginable but fails to present them in a way that makes them worth sitting through once again.

Echoes of War needs prettier visuals and bigger ideas, because the dialogue is too formulaic and the violence to come is entirely too predictable to hold our interest for 100 minutes.

However you view the western in American filmmaking — as a moth-eaten relic or an eternal form to be resurrected every few years — there's something stale about Kane Senes's tepid historical drama Echoes of War, which utilizes the genre's symbols without delivering on its potential for moral or narrative satisfaction.