Film Review: ‘Hostiles’ with Christian Bale is a Big Bad Bore

Submitted by PatrickMcD on January 5, 2018 - 8:54am

CHICAGO – “Hostiles” is an exercise in prestige western boredom. It’s competently made, but its as lifeless as a scalped corpse on the prairie. It’s long on pretty western locales and impressive facial hair, but short on story, characters, or much of anything else to help keep your eyelids from closing.

Rating: 2.0/5.0

Christian Bale is a revered U.S. Army Indian fighter who is assigned to escort a dying chief (Wes Studi) from New Mexico to his ancestral homeland in Montana. Bale stays mostly stoic, along with everyone else. “Hostiles” comes from the grunting “Revenant” school of filmmaking… the journey through the Old West seemed to take place in real time and took so long I half expected to develop saddle sores.

The endless shots of Bale leading a train of horses through the sagebrush are punctuated by flashes of violence… an ambush here, a Comanche raid there. But they seem to spring up simply to give Bale’s character something to do, and the scenes aren’t particularly thrilling. Even the addition of a mentally deranged prisoner (Ben Foster) – who used to be one of Bale’s loyal soldiers – does little to liven things up.

”Hostiles” releases in Chicago on January 5th, nationwide January 19th. See local listings for theaters and show times. Featuring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Stephen Lang, Bill Camp, Timothée Chalamet and Ben Foster. Screenplay by and directed by Scott Cooper. Rated “R”