The “brutal” movie Kurt Russell called one of a kind: “You’re not going to see another like it”
As someone who earned their stripes as a man for all seasons, it must take a unique kind of movie for Kurt Russell to say that it’s unlike anything audiences have ever seen before.
He’s the reigning king of the cult classic, after all, and he’s barely met a genre that he hasn’t seized by the horns at least once. Action, drama, comedy, horror, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, biopics; you name it, and the chances are high that he’s done it. He even played Santa Claus. Twice, for fuck sake.
At this stage of his career, which began all the way back in 1963 when he hoofed Elvis Presley in the shins while making his screen debut in It Happened at the World’s Fair, John Carpenter’s muse has taken on every challenge that’s been thrown his way, and there’s little that can surprise him these days. Little, but not nothing.
The second-generation star has made classic movies, great movies, good movies, average movies, and the odd terrible movie, but never in his life had he been a part of anything as indecipherably, inexplicably, gratuitously, and stomach-churningly fucked up as writer and director Craig S Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk.
What begins as a deceptively straightforward ode to the classic western, with Russell and his mighty facial hair leading a hardy band of character actors into the rugged terrain of the American West to locate a trio of abductees, eventually becomes something else entirely. Namely, a gruesome odd to the grisliest exploitation fare that cinema has ever devised.
It wasn’t your typical Kurt Russell flick, and he knew that better than anyone. “When I first finished reading it, I thought, ‘What the hell was that? What did I just read’?” he admitted. “I don’t know what category it fits into. You think of a video store: there’s science fiction, romance, horror, and then there’s Bone Tomahawk, and the category is just a question mark with an exclamation point.”
He’s not wrong, with Zahler spinning several narrative, thematic, and genre plates all at once, but by the time the 132-minute epic reaches its finale, it’s much more of a horror than anything else. If you’ve seen it, then you’ll know the scene that pushes it over the edge. If you haven’t, then count your lucky stars.
That said, Russell didn’t think it should have been categorised as a horror. “This is graphic, this is brutal,” he understatedly and accurately surmised. “But there’s no Freddy Krueger here. This is real. It’s like, ‘Yep, that’s how you tear a man apart’. You’re not going to see another movie like it. I’ve never done one like this. I’m really proud of it.”
All of the points he made are true. Bone Tomahawk is brutal, it’s graphic, it’s realistic, it does involve people being torn apart, you won’t see anything like it, and he’d never made anything like it before, either. Whether that’s something that makes you want to track it down, though, is a matter of taste and personal preference, but it’s definitely not one for the faint of heart.
