Tom Han­ks hits the coun­try roads in the News of the World trailer

Among the finest Tom Han­ks per­for­mances of recent vin­tage came via Cap­tain Phillips, in which the actor rec­on­ciled his warm, com­fort­ing pres­ence as America’s dad with a stee­l­i­er exte­ri­or brought on by cri­sis. He’s now set to reunite with direc­tor Paul Green­grass for the first time since, in anoth­er role that sees him strik­ing a del­i­cate bal­ance between har­di­ness under fire and his nat­ur­al pater­nal tenderness.

Today brings the first trail­er for News of the World, a big-bud­get West­ern with all the trim­mings. Han­ks beat the coro­n­avirus, and now, a more griz­zled ver­sion of the man will stave off life-threat­en­ing dan­ger of more imme­di­ate sorts – maraud­ers, natives, the ele­ments. Oater stuff.

Han­ks stars as a ram­bling trou­ba­dour in the Old West, going from set­tle­ment to set­tle­ment to tell his tales of the wars, pol­i­tics, and cul­tur­al events tran­spir­ing beyond their iso­la­tion. In his trav­els, he encoun­ters a name­less young girl (Hele­na Zen­gel, a Ger­man up-and-com­er who showed great promise in the recent Net­flix pro­duc­tion Sys­tem Crash­er) left to her own devices after the Kiowa tribe killed her par­ents six years prior.

He takes her in, and as he fer­ries her through the treach­er­ous land­scape to a safe new home, the two hard­ened souls learn to feel again from one anoth­er. He’s car­ry­ing around grief for his dead wife, mak­ing them sim­pati­co spir­its on their odyssey through nature’s most for­bid­ding tracts. He breaks down her walls along with her elec­tive mutism, build­ing the inti­mate bond of sur­ro­gate par­ent and child.

This falls in line with a long tra­di­tion of west­erns about men on res­cue mis­sions for the sake of a younger woman, dat­ing back to the genre’s most pop­u­lar mas­ter­work The Searchers. Han­ks makes for a soft­er foil to ol’ John Wayne, off­set­ting the grit need­ed to sur­vive out in the wild with his crinkly smile and invit­ing laugh. He’s Tom Han­ks! We’d fol­low him through the desert. Who wouldn’t?

News of the World comes to select cin­e­mas in the US on 25 Decem­ber, and then the UK on 1 Jan­u­ary, 2021.