Review of The Revenant (2015) by Thewaffle — 14 Jan 2016

This is a great movie for masochists. Fairly early on you'll come to the realization that this is going be be a long, brutal slog. Beautifully shot and acted, The Revenant is certainly a good movie. Unfortunately, it just doesn't know when to move on. Our hero is pushed through one brutal encounter after another to the point that it begins to feel an awful lot like a torture fetish. There is an on-going side-plot that is of little relevance to the overall storyline, except for introducing just a little more brutality into what is already a violent world.

Tom Hardy is the real star of the film, and we see him play at different levels, whereas Di Caprio is constantly turned up to 11. There isn't a scene where he's not suffering, brooding, or murdering. He endures difficulties that make Watership Down look tame, and the whole film plays like a marathon of pain with never a moment of respite. The very sparse moments of relief feel more like a sigh of exhaustion rather than moments of triumph.

I would have liked to see the filmmakers go a little less conventional with their approach to Hardy's character Fitzgerald. In some ways he's the obligatory racist villain cast against Di Caprio's earnest, heroic, damsel-saving protagonist. But with slightly different choices the film could have been less one-dimensional, and Hardy and Di Caprio could have been pitted against each other by fate and not because Hardy is just evil. Hardy's justifications for his actions make sense, and it's not clear why he needed to be lying for them.