Billy Bob Thornton’s original cut of this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel is supposed to have been around four hours long. In the paring down to a sensible length much of the plot seems to have been lost, although it still remains a slow-paced experience. The lyrical cinematography, by Barry Markowitz, magnificently evoking the scenic splendour of the Tex-Mex borderlands, is by far the strongest point of interest.

In 1949 Matt Damon, as a young Texan thwarted of his inheritance, takes off on horseback with a friend (Henry Thomas) to try his luck south of the border. En route they meet a teenage horse thief (Lucas Black) who teams up with them, but then departs hastily after trying to put one over a nasty bunch of Mexicans.Thomas and Damon then find wrangling jobs on the ranch of a tycoon (Ruben Blades). Inevitably Damon falls for the pouting, glamorous senorita (Penelope Cruz) who is their employer’s daughter. The idyll ends when the young men are taken away and banged up in a foul penitentiary as a consequence of their earlier involvement with Black, who turns out to have become a murderer, and is unofficially executed.

The main problem with this attractive looking film is that the torpid narrative is never very involving. It is hard to sense Damon’s anger, since he behaves throughout as someone to whom rotten things happen as a matter of course, and even the grand passion, although he and Cruz were off-screen lovers at the time, seems lukewarm. Perhaps one day the director’s lengthy original will appear on DVD, but will it be any better?