Review: ‘Bone Tomahawk’ (2015)
Any film whose opening shot presents a sleeping cowpoke’s throat being slit, swiftly followed by the disembowelling of Sid Haig, clearly knows its business. S. Craig Zahler’s pulp cannibal western Bone Tomahawk actually turns out to be a rather more stately affair than this gory prelude might suggest, concerning the attempts of a posse led by Kurt Russell’s Sheriff Hunt to track down a housewife (Lili Simmons) and one of his deputies (Evan Jonigkeit) who have been abducted from the quiet frontier town of Bright Hope by members of a mysterious cave-dwelling Tribe With No Name.
Borrowing its premise from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and featuring Richard Jenkins as a rambling Walter Brennan-esque coot, Zahler’s is the latest in a string of fine westerns we’ve been treated to lately, after Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman (2014) and Slow West (2015) with Michael Fassbender. Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, also featuring Russell, is on the horizon and only Tarantino could hope to surpass the violence we find here. In fact, he’d be doing well to even match Zahler on that score.
When the citizens comprising Hunt’s rescue party — Jenkins’ Chicory, Patrick Wilson’s desperate husband Arthur O’Dwyer and dandy loner John Brooder (Matthew Fox) — finally reach the troglodytes’ mountain lair, we soon witness the execution of one of the captives they’d set out to save, Deputy Nick. The poor lawman is dangled naked upside down and cleaved in twain like a beef carcass, a genuinely shocking act of butchery carried out with the film’s titular weapon, itself a sharpened bear’s jaw fiendishly repurposed for the job. When Hunt himself is captured, he is trussed up and slashed across the torso. The natives then wedge the man’s own tin hip flask — especially heated over a camp fire — directly into the gaping wound, to understandable howls of pain. Wild cheers erupted from the audience at the Odeon Leicester Square as the cannibal chief got his savage comeuppance for these atrocities. Your move QT.
Bone Tomahawk is entertaining, exquisitely lit and pleasingly character-focused, but far from perfect. Wilson’s O’Dwyer is landed with a broken leg, which makes his participation in the group’s mission complicated, slowing their progress, but also badly hampering the film’s already suspect pacing. Quite why Wilson should have become Hollywood’s go-to masochist I’m not sure, but the actor once more finds himself in a near-constant state of anguish and is again brutally operated upon by an amateur surgeon, just as he was in David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005). Film School Rejects critic Rob Turner was particularly disappointed with Bone Tomahawk and blamed Fox for “auditioning for the role of Calvin Candie in an off-Broadway production of Django Unchained”. I’ll give him that one. We’re also in agreement that Russell’s grizzly gravity ultimately carries the day.
The usual tiresome reactionaries on Twitter have been quick to label Zahler’s film racist, but that charge is absurd. Bone Tomahawk is clearly not about demonising an ethnic group. Its wyrd naked Indians are not identified with any real Native American tribe and, it’s heavily hinted, may not even be human at all. Their dusty, boar-toothed look would certainly be more at home in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) or George Miller’s recent Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) than Dances With Wolves (1990). The one positively identified Naive American on screen, Zahn McClarnon’s Professor, is presented with respect as a dignified and learned man whose expertise Hunt actively seeks out and acts upon. Finally, the only racist sentiments actually mouthed by the film’s characters come from Brooder, who’s family were slain by warring braves. Brooder’s attitude is clearly explained by his backstory and those determined to find a moral can take satisfaction in his death. A 19th century frontiersman’s distrust of foreign Others would, incidentally, hardly have been uncommon. That certainly seemed like an idiotic accusation to me.
After the LFF screening, producers Jack Heller and Dallas Sonnier told us that Bone Tomahawk’s low-budget location shoot was completed in a remarkably swift 21 days, with every word of Zahler’s 128 page script making it onto the screen. The only snag they ran into was only being able to afford four days’ worth of production time with horses, hence the animals’ unexplained theft while the posse are sleeping midway through the plot!
Originally published at www.fadedvideo.co.uk on October 11, 2015.
