REVIEW
Hostiles
Stars: 0.5 OUT OF 5 STARS
Starring Christian Bale, Wes Studi, Rosamund Pike, Adam Beach, Jonathan Majors, Rory Cochrane, Stephen Lang, Q’orianka Kilcher, and Ben Foster
Written and Directed by Scott Cooper
Rated: 14A for brutal violence and coarse language
Runtime: 134 minutes
Now playing at Cineplex Odeon North Edmonton
It’s important to note how writer/director Scott Cooper’s new film Hostiles starts off with this quote from D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Lawrence was the English writer known for such books as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a writer of stories that dealt with people of many passions living in a repressed, industrializing civilization.
Hostiles is set in a time and place not so far removed from Lawrence’s when you really examine it. It is 1892 in the new frontier of the American West, a place explored fairly well in cinematic storytelling. Probably the best example that I can think of is in Clint Eastwood’s exemplary Unforgiven, the 1992 film written by David Webb Peoples. It lands in this reviewer’s approved list of movies that are exceedingly popular, watchable, rewatchable, and also well regarded critically.
If you remember, it was the story of a retired and reformed gunman’s return to paid service so that he could do better for his two kids. It featured some famous lines about a killer’s history of killing and what the experience does to his own psychology: “It’s a helluva thing killing a man…” and “I've killed everything that walks or crawls.” At the time that he won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, Eastwood (in an interview with the American Film Institute) said that it would be his last Western movie “for fear of repeating himself or imitating someone else’s work.”
How ironic then that Cooper copies those famous killing lines practically verbatim during just one of numerous overwrought and belaboured speeches in this dusty snoozer. That is just the most egregious example of what makes Hostiles such an atrocious film, with some of the others including the glacial pacing and the colossally overacted underacting. Stars Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike should have known better.
This award-baiting movie features Bale as Blocker, a retiring army captain who’s seen and done some pretty bad things in the unforgiving, lawless land. He has not the slightest dint of affection for any Indigenous person. His last job is to escort the dying Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk and his family members back to their homeland in Montana under direct order from the president. That means a journey of 1,000 miles by horseback across all kinds of terrain including canyons and rivers. Oh, and there’s vicious Comanche warriors all over the place. Basically, he’s being forced to do something that’s unpleasant in all kinds of ways, not the least of which is that he despises those he’s assigned to protect.
Along the way, the party adds one member: Rosalie (Pike), a woman who recently escaped from one such Comanche attack yet survives, severely emotionally scarred from losing all of her family.
What we’re left with is a long road for the collective to muse on humankind’s basic nature, the effect of so much violence on a person’s character, and why can’t your mortal enemies just be nicer to you, all the while trying to stifle every possible human emotion in order to not break down right in the middle of nowhere. Some do this better than others. Bale’s mumbling performance is essentially two hours of a guy trying to look like one of those downcast soldiers with hangdog expressions that you’d see in those really old photographs. He nails it, sadly.
Hostiles should have been a film with at least a heart, if not a decent amount of brains. Look at all the talent that was thrown at it, and wasted. I couldn’t even understand half of the gruff, drawling dialogue through all of that misery and facial hair. For a moment, I considered a second viewing with subtitles or the script in hand, but then I thought that would be another two hours that I could have spent watching the snow accumulate on my car.
On the upside, this movie is perfect for anyone who appreciates beautiful scenery and a fine moustache or two. They are indeed commendable.
