"Bone Tomahawk" - Quick and Dirty Review

Patrick Wilson, Kurt Russel, Richard Jenkins, and Matthew Fox in Bone Tomahawk

I have always been an advocate for genre originality. Don't just do the same old thing over and over again. Make the established genre rules that exist your own. That is why I deeply appreciate the little known Bone Tomahawk, even though I do not think that it is completely successful. For the first two thirds, it finds itself being a sort of western Tarantino-type carbon copy, but it actually works. There is a fantastic cast including Kurt Russel, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins, and Matthew Fox who are all uniformly excellent with the physicality of their roles. The characters are very likable and interesting and their dialogue is witty. For the micro-budget that the movie had to work with, the film has great production value and is shot well; giving it a claustrophobic feel that absolutely works even though the desert seems to stretch on. It represents the feelings of the characters well and the impending doom that is about to meet them.

It is when that impending doom arrives that it sort of loses me a bit. Without spoiling too much, once these characters reach the location that they are traveling to, they meet the enemies that they have been warned about since the beginning and it gets violent, and I mean VERY violent. The film pulls a 180 and suddenly becomes a horror film on the level of something like The Hills Have Eyes. This includes some of the most disturbing death scenes in recent memory. It made sense that this movie had a limited release and no MPAA rating. Surely if it had one, it would get slapped with the NC-17, which cannot be marketed well at all. While the carnage is impressive and terrifying, I do not think that it meshes well with the rest of the film as well as it could have. It tries to be unexpected with its gore and scares but ends up feeling jarring. It abandons character development and deliberate storytelling and just becomes a bloodbath in the end. Normally this is fine if that is the kind of movie that I expect that from, but I found that they left character arcs hanging and opted for a simple "life sucks and you are not prepared for it" message when the first two thirds of the film hinted toward something more nuanced.

I enjoyed Bone Tomahawk and I admire its originality. I wish that it had a little bit more to say after the carnage was done.

Grade: B-.

Bone Tomahawk is now available on DVD and blu-ray.