K-SCORE: 55
Director: Alejandro Inarritu
Based on: The Revenant by Michael Punke
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, a CGI grizzly bear
“replacing everything with heavy breathing and guttural sounds”
Spoiler Level: Moderate
The Revenant is about eighty percent to twenty percent, four to one ratio on grunting to content. Tom Hardy seems to be making an entire multi-million dollar celebrity living out of mumbling lines written by others while doing weird stuff with phlegm. DiCaprio has finally learned that you can earn the respect of film’s most prestigious institutions by forging speaking entirely and just replacing everything with heavy breathing and guttural sounds, ideally while crawling through snow and dirt with fake blood caked on your face. The Motion Picture Academy gave McConaughey the Oscar for losing an unhealthy amount of weight to play an AIDS riddled southerner, then to Eddie Redmayne for his realistic portrayal of an ALS patient, and now to DiCaprio for his successfully being ravaged by a grizzly bear to within an inch of his life. Apparently, gentlemen, they just want to see you suffer literally. Reading about The Revenant online indicates that DiCaprio wasn’t the only one on set to suffer, just the one who was most rewarded. Inarritu apparently put his crew through hellish conditions to get the shots he wanted, and then made comments about having to “cut out-of-tune instruments from the orchestra.” What a prick. This doesn’t surprise me too much though. I watched Birdman.
“easily forty to fifty minutes too long”
Here’s the thing, Inarritu. Your film just isn’t that good. Maybe you think it’s some high-concept art to have an actor breathe onto the camera and fog up the lens. I call it breaking the fourth wall, which can’t possibly be what you want to do in a movie about a desperate survival situation and violence in the new American frontier. Also, your pacing is disastrous, the film is easily forty to fifty minutes too long for the story you want to tell, and the survival itself is either unexplained or cliche. Apart from Glass blowing apart gunpowder in his neck to fix a hole, I felt I’d either seen it all before or was asking questions like: what happened to his obviously broken leg? or how did he fix those lacerations on his back if he can’t reach there? And thematically it’s pathetic. The essential concept of “revenge being in Gods hands” is kind of thrown out the window at the end, even though it’s verbally repeated. If you stabbed someone through the gut, lodged the shiny end of a hatchet in his ribcage and threw him into a freezing river where some white-man hating native peoples are waiting with a skinning knife, revenge was in your hands.
I thought these things smelled bad on the outside...
The Revenant has a number of really intense scenes and has a much more realistic depiction of the wildness of the region it depicts in the early nineteenth century than most films. For that, it has some power. But come on, you can’t record that many minutes of DiCaprio choking on his own saliva and expect me to love it.