"Blu-ray or Bust" - THE REVENANT

"Blu-ray or Bust"

THE REVENANT (2015, R, 156 minutes, RATPAC ENTERTAINMENT/REGENCY ENTERPRISES)

If there was one genre of film where you could enjoy a bit of unrealistic reality, it was always ‘The Western’.

Gunslingers were gentlemen, the bad guys wore black, there was a saloon with hookers and the hero was in love with the madam—you know, stuff that probably really happened, just not in such soft lighting. I blame Clint Eastwood for destroying all that. With 1992’s UNFORGIVEN, he rewrote ‘The Western’ by adding a touch of brutality that you hadn’t seen in too many prior cowboy movies. It felt more honest, more realistic, more freaking SINCERE.

Combine that with Edward Zwick showing us what a cannonball REALLY does to a person with his one stroke of brilliant brutality in 89’s GLORY, and you have a genre, redefined. Now, we get to see Leonardo DiCaprio get mauled by a bear. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s REVENANT isn’t a Western so much as it is a historical revenge story. Yes, there are cowboys in shoot-outs; yes, there are Native Americans that scalp people.

Yet the tent-pole for this rather lengthy tale of revenge/redemption/remorse is a really loooong bear attack. While that CGI bear looks magnificent, and the reality of the situation does make the scene quite powerful, something feels a tad off to me about the entire sequence. Yeah, yeah, I know; in reality, a real bear attack probably takes that long. And I know that the scene sets up the entire rest of the film. So it is important—I get that. It is also long. And it makes you feel a wee bit uncomfortable—which, by the way, is a great sign for a filmmaker. Art is at its height when it creates a reaction, and that scene definitely got a reaction out of me.

But the rest of the film?

Meh.

Don’t get me wrong—the photography by Emmanuel Lubezki (GRAVITY, and he was also the ever-roaming eye of Iñárritu’s BIRDMAN) is more than deserving of the Academy Award he received for his efforts here, and the directing by Iñárritu is spot on. Tom Hardy plays the “villain” well—hell, all of the actors are dead-on in their roles. But prepare to invest yourself—this is a long two-and-a-half hours of beautiful scenery, augmented by good performances. Way back in the day, the same story would have been told in an hour-and-a-half, and would not have left you feeling exhausted and mentally drained afterwards. The story itself is simple: expert tracker trying to help gather supplies gets mauled, his Indian son gets murdered, and he tracks down Bane/Mad Max to get revenge. Really, a basic Western premise, in the hands of a director that has a whole lot of visual storytelling to express.

The Special Features consist of one documentary, but by the time you get through this film, you really won’t want to watch anything else about it—yes, this is the one time I applaud a disc for not having much in the way of extras… (although a gag reel would have been great).

There is a good film in here—you just have to work to find it, and you shouldn’t really have to do that. It’s supposed to be a movie, not a dose of total reality.

Film Grade: B-

Special Features: A-

Blu-Ray Necessary: For the scenery, yes

- T.S. Kummelman