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The most disappointing films of 2018: Hostiles

A review by Brooks Rich

This movie makes me sad. I want to call this one of the best of the year but personally it doesn’t come together as a whole. This will be a hard one to discuss because I don’t want to ruin anything from this film. So I’ll do my best to explain the film and why it doesn’t work for me. 
I went into this excited because I am a giant fan of the western, a genre which deserve a resurgence. Unforgiven ended the true American western for awhile and we were left with more Hollywood type westerns like Tombstone, Maverick, and The Quick and The Dead. It really took until the ‘00s for more bleak westerns like Unforgiven with the remakes of 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit. 
Hostiles seemed to be that kind of western, a realistic look at how dangerous the west was. About how it was hard to keep your humanity out there. This film has a lot of good ideas and stellar performance. Christian Bale is an army captain tasked with escorting an imprisoned Indian war chief, played by Wes Studi, back to sacred land so he may die. The tension between Bale and the chief is palpable. Of course there’s going to be a shaky understanding between the two former enemies as this journey is anything but easy. 
Director Scott Cooper has a good eye and makes this feel like a true classic western. I just wish the pieces came together for me. This is one of those films where I don’t think it’s bad. I see what Cooper was going for, a look at how there is no one threat in the old west. Everyone is against you so to speak. Hostiles uses that to it’s advantage. Every scene introduces a new threat. There’s not one singular villain like in most westerns. The antagonists introduced at the start of the film, honestly one of the best openings of the year, are not the antagonists we end with. I know I’m praising the film when I said it was disappointing. I do admire most of this film. It was so close to being one of my favorite films of the year. But at the end it falls apart. I won’t ruin it but in my opinion the film uses a cheap shot to wrap up the plot.  A plot device from earlier is completely ignored. It felt unfair and I should never say that at the end of a film. Hostiles is one of those movies ruined by it’s final moments. A damn shame really.
But although I say the film was ruined for me by the end, I still recommending checking it out. Because someone may really like this and I totally get it. This is not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. I just wish it hadn’t let me down so much at the end. 
2.5/5


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