Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Not long ago I watched "Dragged Across Concrete", another movie directed by S. Craig Zahler, as well as "Bone Tomahawk". Two things I didn't like there, the ending a bit too "unhappy" + a couple scenes that were over the top as violence level. The same issues - especially the latter - I have also with "Bone Tomahawk". On the other hand, what I liked in "Dragged Across Concrete" were the dialogues. And "Bone Tomahawk" it's even better on that account, this being the main reason that convinced me to choose the movie for this entry.

The context is set somewhere in the wild west, close to the Mexican border. The movie starts with two thieves who ravage a camp in the dessert and find themselves after attacked while crossing some Indian territory. Only one of them escapes, and the action moves a couple days later, in the evening, in a tiny town, where the brigand ends up in a bar. There's not long until he gets a place on the "suspects" list of the backup deputy, an old widower, who seems to get bored of too much free time. And like that we're getting in a situation where the thief gets a bullet in his leg shot by the local sheriff, who has the unfortunate habit to do that too often with who tries to run instead answering his questions. Unfortunate business also for the wife of a local cowboy, the only apparently qualified for bullet extractions and consequently summoned to do that in the middle of the night. The problem is that in the morning she's still not back home, and the missing list is joined by the thief, the first deputy left to guard them and a couple horses in a stable. The tracks left: some arrows and a corpse in messed up state, analyzed by the local Indian expert lead to a somber conclusion - the attack was carried out by an isolated tribe of cannibals, living in caves and led to the town by the trespassing thief. Despite the warnings, the sheriff doesn't have much choice and forms a posse to recover the taken together with his backup deputy, the missing woman's cripple husband and another guy with some childhood trauma after his interaction with the Indians. And so, we get on our way...

As I was saying, the strength of the movie is mainly in the dialogues, and secondly in the acting. But the script is the base for that. You can feel that the author is also a writer. I've seen some comparison with Tarantino, given that the movie was released the same year as "Hateful Eight", but it's not in the same category. I found it much more clever in the lines construction. We have a sort of humor that alternates somewhere between dry and dark, which maybe can be seen also in the movies of Jim Jarmusch ("Ghost Dog") or Martin McDonagh ("Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri", "Seven Psychopats", "In Bruges"), although it has something particular here. We're left however with the problem of the excessive violence, which actually is mostly about a single scene, but a really hard to watch one. Practically, it stands out in the movie, in strong contrast with the rest. I can understand the intent of shock, but I doubt it serves to anything else here than marketing, and it's not even very honest, since the rest of the action runs relatively peacefully in comparison. I even had to search for a poster to not include "brutal" as tagline. Well... maybe it's catchy for some audience, for me it spoiled my rating, but the movie definitely deserves watching for the rest of it.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5