Parents Guide for
True Grit (2010) More at IMDbPro »

Mr. LaBoeuf mentions to Mattie that he thought about giving her a kiss when he saw her sleeping. He also slaps in slightly sexualized way.

A man considers raping a young woman.

Rooster kills more than his fair share. Before he joins Mattie, we learn that he killed 23 people as a marshal ("I never shot anybody I didn't have to," he swears), and he adds another half-dozen to his tally before the credits roll. One takedown involves a point-blank bullet to someone's head, and we see blood spray against the wall. Mattie and LaBoeuf both shoot folks too.

One bad guy kills another (who had already been shot in the leg by Rooster) to prevent him from revealing too much information. Before he stabs him in the chest, he cuts off the victim's fingers. (We see a couple of them on the table.) Mattie and Rooster find a body (strung up in a tree) being gnawed on by a vulture. Rooster tells Mattie to climb up and cut the thing down. Of course it lands with a thud on its head. We see three people hanged, and they drop with jarring thunks.

When Mattie braves the river to join LaBoeuf and Rooster, LaBoeuf pushes her down and paddles her by way of punishmentfirst with a bare hand and then with a nearby stick. He doesn't stop until Rooster points a gun at him. It's the mildest bit of trouble Mattie finds herself in for a good long while. Before her journey is done, she's been hit, shoved and kidnapped. An outlaw grinds his boot into her face while pointing a gun at her. Chaney puts a blade to her throat. Rooster roughly knocks around a couple of kids who've been tormenting a donkey.

Mattie tumbles into a deep pit and finds snakes using a skeletal corpse's ribcage as a nest. One of the snakes bites her, and Rooster's forced to cut an X into the wound to suck out the poison. She still needs immediate attention, though, so they both get on Mattie's horse and ride for hours and hours across the countryside, looking for help. Rooster spurs and whips the horse to exhaustion, pushing the pony beyond its breaking point. When it collapses, he shoots it in the head, then picks up Mattie and carries her himselfhis labored gasping mirroring the horse's final desperate breaths. In the end, we learn Mattie has her arm amputated, and we see her years later, missing an arm.

Horses get shot during a battle. There's talk of women and children massacred during the Civil War. Rooster promises Mattie that he'll flay the soles of her father's killer's feet if it will make her feel better. LaBoeuf is bound by a lasso, and dragged around, which causes him to bite his tongue. We Rooster reaching in to his mouth, with blood oozing from the sides (the scene is dark, so some of the blood in hard to see).

A couple uses of "son-of-a-b**ch" and a few uses each of "hell" and "damn" ("damn" is paired with "God" half a dozen times). There is one F-word at the end of the film but is hard to hear as the man who delivers it is mumbling and talking fast.

Rooster drinks alcohol to excess in several scenes. LaBoeuf smokes a pipe, and Rooster has Mattie roll a cigarette for him. He is also seen smoking cigarettes in a few scenes.

A man is found hanged in the woods. A bird is pecking on him and his eyeball is missing.

A man cuts off another man's fingers, which are shown breifly lying on a table with blood around them.

A man riding an exhausted horse stabs it in the rear with a knife to make it run faster. When the horse collapses with exhaustion, he shoots it out of mercy (this may upset some viewers).