Whoa Nellie! Ron Howard's exciting Western is packed with frontier violence and starkly beautiful images. Native American mysticism also figures prominently, although no one in this rendering of life in 1885 New Mexico would ever use the expression Native Americans. They're "Injuns."

Cate Blanchett is Maggie, a homesteader and healer raising two daughters and administering frontier medicine to passersby, as long as they're not Indians. She's an outspoken Christian with a sharp antipathy toward "savages." Her prejudice is confirmed when her eldest child (Evan Rachel Wood) is kidnapped by Apache renegades and earmarked for the slave auctions in Mexico along with some other girls, both white and Indian.

Once you get accustomed to her accent, Blanchett's stout performance is top-notch, but like the movie Maggie is the opposite of warm and fuzzy. Tommy Lee Jones is fantastic as her estranged father -- a convert to Indian ways who abandoned his family and chose to live with the Chiricahua tribe. This partly explains her animosity toward all things Native American; it also makes for a compelling character. Jones gives this restless spirit, caught between two cultures, a sad, wry quality that's authentic and affecting. His deeply lined face and flowing hair mirror all the movie's conflicts.

Accompanied by Maggie's younger girl (Jenna Boyd), father and daughter track the brutal band of kidnappers led by a demonic medicine man (Eric Schweig). This Apache witch is capable of ripping people’s hearts out, casting fever-inducing spells, or bashing heads in with a blunt object. Scarred, smudged, and sadistic, he aims to inflict as much pain as possible. In spots, the actions of the Indian party, which includes some mercenary white men, seem almost campy. But as Howard pads the action with more supernatural episodes you realize a serious point about mysticism is being unconvincingly ventured.

Everything in the gritty film is beautifully presented thanks to Salvatore Totino's gorgeous cinematography, evidently inspired by the work of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Ravishing shots of sky and landscapes -- desolate scrub, dusty hills, fuchsia sunrises and cloudy sunsets -- are entertaining in themselves. The bone-chilling plot, charged with sexual and gender tension, owes plenty to past Westerns, especially John Ford's 1956 classic The Searchers in which John Wayne tracked his kidnapped niece. While there's nothing pro forma about it, the long movie can't be called concise or precise. Yet since when has depth trumped vivid action, especially in a Western?

There are only a limited number of stories in any genre, and The Missing does insist on ringing a contemporary note. Maggie comes to appreciate Indians and their culture. You can almost imagine her referring to them as Native Americans.

(Released by Columbia Pictures and rated "R" for violence.)