Directed by Jan Kounen
Written by Matt Alexander and Gérard Brach
Starring Vincent Cassel, Michael Madsen and Juliette Lewis
Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) is a Marshal for a small town in the west. One day he runs into Wallace Sebastian Blount (Michael Madsen), a man from his past, a man that he thought he had killed many years ago. After Wallace escapes from the jail with the help from his men, Blueberry and a couple of men go after him. They track him into sacred Indian territory where Wallace is on the trail of a legendary gold mine. What Wallace and Blueberry eventually find is something totally different and totally unexpected.
Basically this movie is just one long flashback, with the first 20 minutes or so the flashback that shows what happens between Blueberry and Wallace when Blueberry was a young man. At first this is really just a straight forward western but towards the end it spirals into some trippy ass shit that I really can’t explain. It’s just something you really have to see for yourself. Speaking of trippy about halfway through the movie when Blueberry is taking to his Indian friends for treatment after being nearly beaten to death by Wallace, he is given something to drink. Shortly after drinking it he starts hallucinating and we are treated with what he’s seeing. Although it’s really nothing more than just a bunch of CGI snakes, spiders, other insects and what looks like some kind of wacky octopus (?) it is executed fairly well and is pretty cool to watch. I believe they even try to make it where you feel like you are tripping yourself. And at the end of the movie we are treated with another trip scene that last about 20 minutes! Now this trip was just plain fucking wild and by the end of it I was starting to get a little dizzy and loopey myself. It was pretty great!
Like I said earlier it does spiral into something else at the end of the movie and I really couldn’t tell you what is all going on because there weren’t any subtitles for the Indian language. There is quite a bit of Indian dialog throughout the movie and with it not being translated for you it does take away from the movie a tad. Perhaps there are subtitles on other releases, I don’t really know. I have the Russian release and so all the menus and stuff were in Russian. Hell it took me several attempts just to get it on the English language track.
But don’t really let any of this deter you from checking this movie out. It’s worth seeing just for the visuals alone, for it is a beautiful and well shot movie. Tetsuo Nagata did any outstanding job at the photography for this film, beautiful stuff. Jan Kounen also deserves to get some kudos for his directing on this. I’m not familiar with any of his other work but he did a hell of a job on this. Jean-Jacques Hertz and François Roy do a fine job at providing some nice music that really fits the film. I would like to find this soundtrack.
Surprisingly enough there is a fairly big cast on this with the likes of Vincent Cassel (IRRÉVERSIBLE), whom I’m a big fan of, Juliette Lewis (NATURAL BORN KILLERS), Michael Madsen (KILL BILL), who does a nice job as the villain of the movie, Temuera Morrison (STAR WARS: EPISODE II - ATTACK OF THE CLONES) and Ernest Borgnine (THE WILD BUNCH) who has a funny part as the wheelchair bound Sheriff. Eddie Izzard (THE RICHIES) is also in this as a German with the worst German accent I’ve ever heard, hell it seems like he hardly even uses it.
At first I was going to recommend this to Western fans but this is really like no Western you’ve ever seen before. Overall I found this to be a very good movie that is visually stunning that I would recommend to everybody, whether or not it’s a film for you remains to be seen.
8/10
Written by Matt Alexander and Gérard Brach
Starring Vincent Cassel, Michael Madsen and Juliette Lewis
Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) is a Marshal for a small town in the west. One day he runs into Wallace Sebastian Blount (Michael Madsen), a man from his past, a man that he thought he had killed many years ago. After Wallace escapes from the jail with the help from his men, Blueberry and a couple of men go after him. They track him into sacred Indian territory where Wallace is on the trail of a legendary gold mine. What Wallace and Blueberry eventually find is something totally different and totally unexpected.
Basically this movie is just one long flashback, with the first 20 minutes or so the flashback that shows what happens between Blueberry and Wallace when Blueberry was a young man. At first this is really just a straight forward western but towards the end it spirals into some trippy ass shit that I really can’t explain. It’s just something you really have to see for yourself. Speaking of trippy about halfway through the movie when Blueberry is taking to his Indian friends for treatment after being nearly beaten to death by Wallace, he is given something to drink. Shortly after drinking it he starts hallucinating and we are treated with what he’s seeing. Although it’s really nothing more than just a bunch of CGI snakes, spiders, other insects and what looks like some kind of wacky octopus (?) it is executed fairly well and is pretty cool to watch. I believe they even try to make it where you feel like you are tripping yourself. And at the end of the movie we are treated with another trip scene that last about 20 minutes! Now this trip was just plain fucking wild and by the end of it I was starting to get a little dizzy and loopey myself. It was pretty great!
Like I said earlier it does spiral into something else at the end of the movie and I really couldn’t tell you what is all going on because there weren’t any subtitles for the Indian language. There is quite a bit of Indian dialog throughout the movie and with it not being translated for you it does take away from the movie a tad. Perhaps there are subtitles on other releases, I don’t really know. I have the Russian release and so all the menus and stuff were in Russian. Hell it took me several attempts just to get it on the English language track.
But don’t really let any of this deter you from checking this movie out. It’s worth seeing just for the visuals alone, for it is a beautiful and well shot movie. Tetsuo Nagata did any outstanding job at the photography for this film, beautiful stuff. Jan Kounen also deserves to get some kudos for his directing on this. I’m not familiar with any of his other work but he did a hell of a job on this. Jean-Jacques Hertz and François Roy do a fine job at providing some nice music that really fits the film. I would like to find this soundtrack.
Surprisingly enough there is a fairly big cast on this with the likes of Vincent Cassel (IRRÉVERSIBLE), whom I’m a big fan of, Juliette Lewis (NATURAL BORN KILLERS), Michael Madsen (KILL BILL), who does a nice job as the villain of the movie, Temuera Morrison (STAR WARS: EPISODE II - ATTACK OF THE CLONES) and Ernest Borgnine (THE WILD BUNCH) who has a funny part as the wheelchair bound Sheriff. Eddie Izzard (THE RICHIES) is also in this as a German with the worst German accent I’ve ever heard, hell it seems like he hardly even uses it.
At first I was going to recommend this to Western fans but this is really like no Western you’ve ever seen before. Overall I found this to be a very good movie that is visually stunning that I would recommend to everybody, whether or not it’s a film for you remains to be seen.
8/10
This post first appeared on The Random Musings Of A Trash Cinema Cinephile, please read the originial post: here
