Hostiles *** (2017, Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi) – Movie Review

Writer-director Scott Cooper’s 2017 Western Hostiles is well done but it is a bit slow and dour, with an unbelievable, all too rapid change of heart for its hero and a corny ending too.

But Christian Bale does good glowering in an intense, screen-hogging turn as Indian hating Army Captain Joseph J Blocker, who has to escort dying Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family band of Native Americans through dangerous territory to his ancestral grounds. Along the way Blocker and his little company of soldiers pick up Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), a bitter and distraught woman widowed by Indians, and he has to look after her too, which he does with elaborate, old-style good grace.

Bale and Pike have plenty to do – and do it well. Perhaps they seem a bit British, especially Pike, but maybe not. Ben Foster does his usual creepy bad guy turn as Sergeant Charles Wills, giving it a useful workout. But other roles are skimpy and need much more fleshing out. For example, Timothée Chalamet has about five lines as ‘Frenchie’, Private Philippe DeJardin. Luckily for him, Call Me by Your Name also materialised in 2017. 

Timothée Chalamet plays Private Philippe DeJardin.

Stephen Lang as Col. Abraham Biggs, Jesse Plemons as Lt. Rudy Kidder, Adam Beach as Black Hawk and Peter Mullan as Lieutenant Colonel Ross McCowan all get a slight look in, and are effective, but only just. Has this movie been cut down from a much longer epic? Well it is plenty long enough at 133 minutes.

Hostiles looks a treat in the cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi and production design by Donald Graham Burt, there is a strong score by Max Richter, and it generally does the business. It is in every sense an old-fashioned Western, except with two Brits in the star roles instead of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, and a much improved attitude to the Native Americans. It wouldn’t be memorable at all in the Fifties or Sixties among the crowd of Westerns, but it is now because you can’t remember the last time you saw a new Western.

Scott Cooper is the director of Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace and Black Mass.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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