Review: ‘Bone Tomahawk’, an Essential Revisionist Western
Tackling S. Craig Zahler’s brilliant, if troubling, take on the Wild West
Bone Tomahawk is a tough watch. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly why. If you haven’t, I must warn you before you watch it that it is brutal. I am a fan of a lot of extreme cinema, but this one pushes my boundaries at times. It’s incredibly violent and grim.
Beyond the film’s shocking physical violence, which is as visceral as violence on film can get, is a troubling representation of Native Americans. The film’s story is intentionally very simple — after their town is attacked and some of its people are kidnapped, a group of four men must travel to the group of (Native American) kidnappers, kill them and save their townspeople. There is more nuance to it than that, but that’s the basis.
It sounds like your classic western. A sheriff (Kurt Russell, in this case) must kill the ‘Injuns’ and save his (white) town. We’ve seen John Wayne do it a thousand times, and he always smiles through it.
Here, though, writer/director S. Craig Zahler chooses to challenge and reckon with the traditional western. I don’t think that, as a revisionist western, this digs into the brutality of the West in the same way that Clint Eastwood did with Unforgiven or in the…
