Thursday, January 21, 2016

Film Review - The Revenant (2016)

The Revenant is the new film from Aleandro Inniratu who was the director of last year's Birdman and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass a frontiersman who is left for dead after suffering severe injuries in a Bear attack by Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) who also kills Glass's son, Glass however is still alive and seeks Revenge on Fitzgerald.

The Revenant is not a good film I'm afraid and the longer it went on I just found myself getting more and more bored by it but before I delve into that more I want to talk about what I did like and once again Emmanuel Lubiezki's cinematography really delivers the goods, watching the film you really feel like you're out there in the mountains, the water, the snow and the land and Domnhall Gleeson is very good as the young Captain and its a welcome return to form after his very hammy performance as General Tarkin sorry Hux in Star Wars.

But this movie is quite frankly far far too long, at 156 minutes this movie very much wears out its welcome to the point where I just sat there getting more and more fed up with the film and just wanting it all to be over with by the time the climax rolled around and for the film to actually develop some forward momentum in its narrative which stops far too often to take in the scenery and both Leo and Hardy were weak in my mind, all I could see stamped all over Leo's performance is "LOOK I'M SUFFERING, GIVE ME MY OSCAR!!!" and frankly after the great work he's done in Wolf of Wall Street, Django Unchained and the Great Gatsby recently it will just feel like "Here have the Damn Thing" if he was to win for this performance.

As for Hardy its once again another Tom Hardy performance with a mumbly voice and it feels like its dialled up all the way to 15 now I really liked Hardy as Bane in the Dark Knight Rises but here and in Mad Max he just really grated on me and also I feel that with Birdman it was very much a film Inniratu wanted to make, it felt like he had something he wanted to say and he put it together really well and it was all in 2 hours, not 2 hours and 36 minutes that just wears you out frankly.

If the Revenant had been 120-130 minutes I probably would've been happy with it but at 156 minutes it wore out its welcome for me, 1 out of 5.

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