Movie Review: "The Revenant"

Leonardo DiCaprio teams up with the Oscar-winning director of "Birdman," Alejandro Iñárritu, for a new film set in the American Western frontier: "The Revenant." Time Warner Cable News movie critic Neil Rosen filed the following review.

The time is the 1820's and DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, who helps lead a group of fur trappers through the American wilderness.

Early on in the film, Glass is gruesomely mauled by a bear and barely alive. He's abandoned by an evil trapper, played by Tom Hardy, who buries Glass alive and commits a crime that sets Glass, who somehow survives, on a dangerous path, looking for revenge.

It's a simple story that writer/director Iñárritu takes over two-and-a-half hours to tell. There's very little dialogue as DiCaprio, who's favored to win an Oscar, just grunts for a third of the movie because his character is left unable to speak after the bear attack.

As far as the bear attack sequence itself, it's shocking, graphic, and unrelenting: ten minutes of the bear ripping flesh and cracking bones, with blood squirting all over the place. Then, when it's finally over, after a few minutes, the bear returns for another five minutes of mauling and dragging.

Is it realistic? Sure. But does that make it something you want to see? I say no. How many people want to watch gory, multiple stabbings, or the sight of DiCaprio self-cauterizing his throat, as well as several other rather disgusting, overly long and pointless scenes that are better left undescribed?

Forrest Goodluck, who plays DiCaprio's son, looks too close in age to DiCaprio to make that relationship believable. Plus there's a scene near the end, which I won't give away, that is not credible.

The movie was shot quite well by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and some scenes will visually wow you.

After having been subjected to it, the best I can say is that it's all right. But I can't really recommend that anyone see this. What's the point?