Despite some gory splatter early on, one could be forgiven for seeing Bone Tomahawk initially as more revering than revisionist in its approach to the West. Hampered by O’Dyer’s leg and prone to infighting and the attentions of Mexican bandits, Hunt’s posse takes their own sweet time tracking their quarry and with some beautiful cinematography by Benji Bakshi there is more than a tint of The Searchers but with a molasses rich dialogue worthy of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. O’Dwyer and speaks with a lovely grandiloquence and cold psychopathy.įormerly of Lost fame, then later just somewhat lost, Fox more than holds his own among the veterans and creates a memorable character Doc Holliday without the dentistry. Seasoned Indian Killer and dapper dude John Brooder (Matthew Fox) also joins up. O’Dwyer, despite his broken leg, won’t be left behind and deputized old geezer Chicory (a brilliant and almost unrecognisable Richard Jenkins) insists on making up the party too. Sheriff Hunt gathers a posse to go after a clan notorious for its bestial ferocity and rumours of cannibalism. O’Dwyer (Lili Simmons), who is also the town’s medicine lady. However, when a pair of robbers happen across an Indian burial ground, the survivor leads the brutal tribe back to Bright Hope where they attack seizing the robber, a deputy and Mrs. When we find Patrick Wilson’s frontiersman Arthur O’Dwyer injured it comes not from fighting off bandits or Indians from falling off the roof doing repairs during a storm. The massacres have already happened, crime is rife, life is hard, but the law has arrived in the form of Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell). We are on a frontier with civilization just about asserting itself in the small town of Bright Hope. ![]() It doesn’t so much revise the western as bifurcates it with a genre mash of dark, gruesome and bloody originality. Craig Zahler’s debut movie Bone Tomahawk is a horse of an altogether different stripe though. Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar winner Unforgiven is perhaps the apotheosis, but a certain Quentin Tarantino has now dipped his toe twice in the creek and the profane muddy genius of HBO’s Deadwood has also gone a long way to maintaining the validity of genre to contemporary audiences. Since the 1970s it seems that every western is a revisionist western.
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