I was really looking forward to Hostiles because I love westerns and it’s a genre that we don’t see very often anymore. Moreover, a western from the director of Black Mass and starring Christian Bale? Sign me the fuck up. Now having seen it, I’m almost depressed by my lack of feeling toward this film. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it either, thus leaving in the grey abyss of movies that I won’t remember a month after seeing them. Given the pedigree of talent involved, that is a huge disappoint.
Christian Bale plays an Army captain in the late 1800s that has seen some shit and whose primary job has been fighting Indians in the west. He is tasked with escorting a dying Indian chief to Montana so that he can die in his homeland. Problem is that the chief was quite a violent bastard in his younger days and slaughtered several of Bale’s friends, so they don’t exactly like each other. And that’s the entire plot.
I’ll address the positives first because they are pretty damn positive. Christian Bale is amazing in this. You really do feel for this guy and he has PTSD written all over him, if such a diagnosis existed in the old west. We don’t actually see anything that happened to him prior to the start of the film and the movie really doesn’t explain much about his background and such exposition is unnecessary due to the strength of the performance. Bale conveys more about this guy through tone and body language than many actors can do through lengthy exposition dumps. It’s the epitome of show, don’t tell. Rosamund Pike (from Gone Girl and Jack Reacher) is also great as usual, though her character is pretty irrelevant to the minimal plot. The film is also gorgeous and I wish it was filmed and shown in 70mm. Director Scott Cooper is extremely talented and the movie deserves bonus points for cinematography.
Even though the movie looks great, there isn’t much to look at. Really not much happens in this movie and not much happens for a long goddamn time. In the first half hour, I was thinking that this was an early frontrunner for my favorite film of the year. After an hour, I thought it would probably make my top ten. After two hours, I was mainly wondering if nacho fries were available at Taco Bell yet. That’s what my mind does when I watch people wonder through the Midwest for a freaking eternity without a plot development in sight. Sure, people die and whatever. But there isn’t any driving narrative force behind any of it. It’s just some people that don’t like each other walking to Montana, filmed in what feels like real time. I was hoping that Rosamund Pike’s character, whose family is brutally murdered in the opening scene, would go seeking revenge or something, but she just spends the film standing around looking sad.
Thematically, I also don’t buy the whole growing-friendship dynamic between Bale and the chief. I’m sorry, but if you butcher my friends, I’m not going to gradually respect you just because we are stuck in the same place. I’m going to murder you at the earliest possible convenience. I know that films now have to be about overcoming differences between different races of people and blah blah. You can call me old-fashioned if you like, but I’m not overcoming my differences. I’m killing you and possibly your family. This movie can take its message of tolerance and understanding and shove it up its ass.
This is a movie that I feel bad about not liking because the genre is so underrepresented now. It’s not a bad film by any stretch, but I mostly just didn’t care. As far as westerns go, its similar to something like Dances with Wolves. By that, I mean its overly serious and boring. I prefer the spaghetti western variety (my favorite being either The Wild Bunch or Once Upon a Time in the West), mainly because they are fun and stuff actually happens in them. So to summarize my review of Hostiles: You should really watch Once Upon a Time in the West.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostiles_(film)#/media/File:Hostiles_film_poster.jpg
