The good, the bad and the ugly | 15 November 2018

Every era has its western. For 30 years, from The Big Trail through to The Searchers, John Wayne reigned supreme across American cinema, a dispenser of justice forged on the battlefields of the Civil War. Then, from the 1960s, John Ford’s foundations were mixed with Italian influences to create the brutal anti-heroes of the spaghetti westerns. After that, the western began to feel old-fashioned, and started to be lampooned in films such as Blazing Saddles and Three Amigos for its reliance on archetype and cliché, before, at the close of the century, Cormac McCarthy reinvented it as something sparse, literary and realistic. And now, this era’s western takes that one step further.

Red Dead Redemption 2, the eagerly anticipated sequel to Rockstar Games’s groundbreaking 2010 open-world western video game, has been described as ‘unprecedented’, ‘landmark’ and ‘a masterpiece’. It has been greeted with the sort of reverent praise usually reserved for the loftiest of high culture, despite being marketed almost exclusively to teenage boys with £50 to burn. The game revels in the kitschiest of North American landscapes, the perfect metaphor for the poetic mundanity of death. In short, it is a good game that knows it’s a good game.

But it’s also a game of such attritional violence as to stop those not totally inured in their tracks. This is the western as envisaged by McCarthy, not Ford. Within the first stretch of gameplay you’ll dispatch a dozen combatants with pistol and rifle, loot corpses, lasso and hog-tie fleeing enemies and, in a particularly gruesome sequence, face the choice of whether to beat to death, strangle or free a man you’ve captured. (I opted to beat him to death.) At one point you are encouraged to fillet a deer in the last throes of death, and the guttural noises it made as it departed were sufficiently harrowing that my dog (my genuine, on-the-sofa lurcher, not the canine companion the game gives you in order further to divest you of any need for interactions outside the game) started barking at the screen.