HOME, HOME ON DERANGED.......BQ SURVIVES THE HOSTILITIES IN "HOSTILES"

Hostiles (2017)    If we didn't know better, we'd have sworn this film came out of a time capsule buried around the early 1970's........

                  That era served as the Golden Age of 'revisionist' westerns.......in which traditional Western movie myths got turned on their head, dragged kicking, screaming and shooting into current events........and mostly served as barely disguised Vietnam parables, brimming with atrocities, government chicanery, corruption, racism and nihilistic violence.

                   Only one aspect of "Hostiles" betrays its year of production........the film's dry-as-dust,deadly 5 Mile Per Hour pacing.........designed strictly for film festival attendees and hardcore cinema buffs........(any multiplex audience would bail out on this movie after about 15 minutes, once they got a good look at the ever so slow measured dialogue delivery and the deeply internalized, emotionally remote acting from the cast.)

                     Normally, this is a movie we'd run like hell to avoid.........an arid, heavily intellectualized exercise, a determined attempt to bend all the tropes of westerns to its will......even at the risk of being wildly inaccurate and unrealistic about the people and time period it's depicting......

                    The cast made it work for us........even with director Scott Cooper's mighty effort to keep the film at the speed of an oil painting, we settled down to watch the actors work their considerable talents to make the movie at least watchable........

                     And they did.

                     Starting with Christian Bale as the cavalry officer burned out and damaged from a lifetime of brutal Indian wars........now forced, under threat of court martial and loss of his pension, to escort a dying Apache chief, an old enemy, to a tribal burial ground in Montana.

                    The mission takes Bale, his company of men and the chief and his family members on a a long brutal trek, punctuated with bursts of carnage from both Indians and whites that gradually decimate them, one by one.

                     Along the way, Bale manages to find a glimmer of humanity, redemption and the barest hint of affection with a horribly traumatized woman (Rosamund Pike) who's seen her husband and three children slaughtered by a Comanche raiding party...….not to mention a measure of respect for his cancer-stricken foe, played by the great, great Wes Studi.

                     So a long, long meditation on the effects of savagery unfolds, on both the people who dispense it and those who survive it.

                     In film's final shot, it offers up its one and only genuine surprise, given all the misery, tragedy and senseless death it parades in front of us.  ( Let's just say that this ending most definitely separates the film from the 1970's revisionist westerns it resembles.....)

                      A tough call for us. Much to admire, including the quiet but stirring performances. For the actors' work alone, 3 stars (***).  Proceed with caution, this is anything but a popcorn-muncher......take note, early in our review, as to whom this film was crafted for........don't say the BQ didn't give you fair warning......