It’s probably fair to say that Westerns have had their day. The glory days of John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood have long since passed like tumbleweed through a desolate frontier town. Bar the odd novelty revival, Tarantino’s Django Unchained the most obvious example, the Western genre has lost its mythmaking appeal in the technology governed 21st century.

Spying a Western on the London Film Festival bill filled me with as an equal measure of excitement and suspicion. My trepidation stemming from the fact The Salvation was a directed by an unknown Danish director in Kristian Levring and starred footballer come philosopher Eric Cantona as a gun slinging outlaw.

Levring’s influences are worn firmly on the film’s dust smattered sleeve and, in a similar fashion to Once Upon A Time in the West, The Salvation becomes a collated homage of the great Westerns from before. There’s nothing…