Bone Tomahawk is
pretty bizarre piece of film-making, and not in the usual way that one might
think. It isn’t so much that this film
is stylistically constructed or so incredibly bad as to be baffling, but it
takes on the strange task of telling a story that is functionally a Western, yet attempts to infuse a horror element in the last quarter of the film that
feels tonally disparate from everything leading up to that point. It’s a strange combination of elements that
doesn’t quite gel for a number of reasons, the most glaring of which is
apparent from the synopsis.
This is the story of four men who must travel across the
frontier on a rescue mission. Their town
had been raided by a tribe of cannibalistic Native Americans who had abducted
three of the locals as feeding stock.
The sheriff (Kurt Russell), his back-up deputy, a local Indian-killing
enthusiast, and the injured husband of a taken woman make their way across the
plains, necessarily finding ways to get along amidst differing viewpoints.
The obvious issue to take with this set-up is the extremely
racist portrayal of indigenous peoples in this film. It’s a play on an old savage archetype that
has since passed into antiquity in respectable cinema, but the film tries to
circumvent this by making the people seem inhuman in build and mannerisms,
being entirely without a spoken language.
There is even a scene wherein a “respectable” Native American goes out
of his way to explain that these cannibals are not representative of indigenous
tribes as a whole, but this rings pretty hollow when the basic plot
construction consists of four White men saving a White woman from a horde of
non-White racial scary-otypes. The
attempted horror angle in the final quarter of the film not only feels tonally
dissonant from the previous scenes of character building, but it also acts as a
pretty transparent attempt to remove the humanity from an enemy whose inherent
personhood raises incredibly problematic subtext.
And the unfortunate thing is that this film isn’t even
entirely devoid of decent qualities. The
four male leads are all well-acted and have recognizable personas and
characters arcs that don’t feel like shallow archetypes. The script relies on witty banter and
character tension to carry the dialogue in ways that don’t feel dissimilar to a
Tarantino film. And director S. Craig
Zahler has a definite eye for extended scenes, allowing painful and
uncomfortable moments to play out in their near entirety to communicate
character struggles to the audience.
However, despite the talent that is clearly behind the
camera, Zahler is also the writer of this inherently problematic story that,
while functional structurally and entertaining at moments, is offensive by its
very conception due to its use of Native Americans as an antiquated plot
device, and even worse, as horror movie monsters. It may offer platitudes and bend over
backwards to assure you that that isn’t what you are watching, as it’s
anachronistically progressive characters may consistently convey, but I think
the film doth protest too much. Zahler
may have a future career in directing, but this is a pretty offensive first
outing for someone so clearly talented.
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