Dangling somewhere between hilarity and horror, True Grit tells a story of revenge of a 14-year-old girl chasing her father’s killer. The film draws laughs from the audience before wrenching the action back to the realism of violent life in the unsettled West.

Hailee Steinfeld takes on the young but indomitable character of Mattie Ross in her first full-length feature role, displaying her young talent with both the humorous Southern cadence and the sympathetic values of a true western heroine – self-sufficience and persistence to the core. She employs the stubborn, whiskey drinking U.S. Marshal Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn – played by Jeff Bridges – to chase after Josh Brolin’s murderous character, Tom Chaney. Also pursuing this outlaw for a crime in the separate country of Texas is LaBoeuf (pronounced with absolutely no French inflection) played by Matt Damon.

The movie opens with the murder of Ross’s father by the outlaw Tom Chaney while the pair is traveling toward Ross’s home in Yell Country. Young Mattie arrives in town to collect his body, and finds that the law cares very little about pursuing the killer. In addition, she finds herself dismissed as a naïve, coddled little girl. Mattie quickly sets out to straighten all records. However, she must bargain with merchants to get the money needed to pay Cogburn as a bounty hunter and get supplies for their hunt for Chaney. Damon steps into the scene as the windbag Texas Ranger, proud of his country and scornful of Cogburn’s admittedly slothful and reprobate character. Seeking Chaney for another crime, he joins up with Cogburn and Ross for a time, all the while explaining the superiority of the Rangers and telling tall tales of the harsh Texas frontier.

Each character in this film has his or her own personal accent, which is easily the funniest part of the film. All the actors deserve credit as they hardly drop a line or take the accents too far into absurdity. Mattie Ross is an incredibly precocious little girl who knows Latin and law terms, but is also knowledgeable of ghost stories. Showing both fierceness when fighting for revenge and innocence when expecting her hired help to be exactly that – helpful – Steinfeld does an incredible job bringing depth to the character of a young girl. Bridges, too, makes the cantankerous Cogburn extremely humorous as he never uses contractions in speech even when falling out of the saddle drunk or evaluating a hung man (“I do not know this man”). But the chatterbox Damon takes the prize for accents with his hilarious Texan accent that must later accommodate a split in half tongue. Damon revealed that he accomplished this by tying a hair tie around his tongue, inspired by the multitudes of those left lying around the house by his daughters.

However, right alongside the truly funny moments of this film are the episodes of extreme violence that the Coen brothers (Ethan and Joel) spring upon the audience as they laugh to themselves. Black humor is undeniably the trademark of this film and compels the audience to question what the Coen brothers’ intentions are, with such a barrage of cruel moments right beside the humor. In particular, the most dueling moment of the film is just after Damon’s tongue is nearly cut off, and Bridges sticks his hand in Damon’s mouth, pulling at the severed flesh while narrating a tale of a friend who ripped the tongue clear out when this happened to him. Damon’s panic is comical, fearing his rival will actually tear out his tongue, yet simultaneously you realize that Bridges is literally torturing Damon for no reason, and that these types of injuries happened with some regularity during this time period. However, the gore does not detract from the film, and potentially gives it more meaning than the previous generation of Western films. Still, a caveat to squeamish watchers: this film is definitely not for the faint of heart. For those who can deal with violence, continue on through True Grit‘s vision of the old West.