Any film that opens with scene-setting text and has the heroine married, impregnated, widowed, disowned and reclaimed all in the first five minutes clearly has been on the wrong end of an editor’s scalpel.

Obviously intended to exist in a longer version and crawling into cinemas around the world since 2005, River Queen is the malformed result of an unhappy shoot and a director too close to his subject matter.

A promising premise echoes The Searchers and Last of the Mohicans, with the Irish Sarah O’Brien (Morton) obsessively tracking her son while around her the tactics of the British army become more severe, and the war escalates into a series of atrocity one-upmanship between them and the Maori tribes.

Sarah is recruited by Wiremu (Curtis), a Maori spy who has infiltrated the British ranks, to travel up river to his village where the tribal chief Te Kai Po (Morrison) is seriously ill.

If Sarah can save the ailing chief, she is promised a reunion with her son, but discovers much has changed in the years since his abduction.

River Queen’s trump card is cinematographer Alun Bollinger’s lush, rich location visuals, conveying the beauty and danger of the untamed land. Bollinger’s work clearly impressed the producers, who charged him with completing filming after Ward was fired (although the director was eventually reinstated for post-production duties).

This fractious shoot (an illness felled Morton and held up filming) is up there on-screen in the wayward plotting, the huge leaps through time, and the reliance on explanatory voiceover to paper over plot cracks.

Ultimately, the audience is left scratching its head over Sarah’s flip-flopping allegiances, and left to enjoy the scenery and the odd well-staged woodland battle scene.

The cast clearly believed they were making a modern classic, with Curtis and Morrison impressive as respectively sympathetic and antagonistic Maoris, while Kiefer Sutherland pops up in a bizarre turn as an Irish soldier (complete with Blarney Stone and Guinness accent) to comment on the irony of Irish troops oppressing another nation for the English.

Come the years later epilogue, any interest in the protagonists’ fates have floated down the river.

Rob Daniel